Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning

Abstract

This book comes at a very advantageous time, for interfaith encounters have become part of a larger conversation in academic and non-academic circles. Journals and conferences have added the dimension of how to understand the “other” and create dialogue in many innovative ways. Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning: Encountering Our Legal Other is precisely the type of text and rigorous academic guide to lead us at a time when so many religious laws are misunderstood – especially between Jews and Muslims. The authors ask some questions: “Can the traditions of Judaism and Islam be read together through a legal religious lens without always having a common ground?” and “Can dialogue precipitate a philosophical framework that can demonstrate self-critical thought and still be engaged with the ‘Other’?” More importantly, in each section ask the authors some core questions about religion and law in order to show why the modern preoccupation with religious law is so relevant. In addition, through their methodological legal analysis, they at times demonstrate why religious law is irrelevant. The scholars featured this book are meticulous, thought-provoking, and timely in terms of their significant lines of questioning. The book is unique in its conception, for Anver M. Emon and the contributors’ organic approach makes it more accessible and, at the same time, academically rigorous. The book emerged from workshops and was “developed further when Emon went to Cambridge University to join Gibbs and others in the Scriptural Reasoning project, where scholars read the scriptural texts of multiple traditions with scholars from those different traditions” (p. xi). Scriptural reasoning allows one to read another’s scriptures in a way that allows for personal readings and reactions to one another’s sacred text, an approach that allows for “recognizing their own otherness to their own respective traditions” (p. xxiii). Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning opens up deeply complex and glaring issues of interpretation, authority of interpretation, and the historical conditions of reading sacred text, especially for religious law. In the first chapter, “Assuming Power: Judges, Imagined Authorities, and the Quotidian,” Rumee Ahmed and Aryeh Cohen introduce us to this complex problem of authority and complex phenomenon through legal schools of thought in both traditions. The question of God as authority is crucial, as the authors ask, almost in a ...