Hallaq Wael B. Sharī'a. Theory, Practice, Transformations

Cambridge University Press, 2009. — 626 p.Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islam has come to fill a pivotal conceptual role of an antithesis to the West, the self-described abode of liberal democracies and the rule of law. With the widespread rise of the Islamist movements during the last three or four decades, so-called Islamic law, or Sharī'a, has increasingly occupied center stage in the languages and practices of politics– mainly in the Islamist camp itself, but also in the Western world. Popular narratives and a staggering array of quasi-scholarly accounts have distorted Sharī'a beyond recognition, conflating its principles and practices in the past with its modern, highly politicized, reincarnations. This book is about distinctions; about what Sharī'a– as doctrine and practice– represented in history; how it functioned within society and the moral community; how it coexisted with the body-politic; and how it was transformed and indeed appropriated as a tool of modernity, wielded above all by the nation-state.