Journal of American Academy of Religion, 2020

In her article, “Islamic Legal Studies: A Critical Historiography,” published in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law, Ayesha Chaudhry criticizes the field of Islamic law, and Islamic studies more broadly, for promoting two hegemonic methodologies: White Supremacist Islamic Studies and Patriarchal Islamic Studies. She argues that these modes of scholarship perpetuate patriarchy, decenter Muslim narratives, privilege precolonial texts, and create barriers to entry into academia. Her resolution is a new form of Islamic studies—Intersectional Islamic Studies—which seeks to recenter Muslim narratives, is committed to social justice, and exposes the problematic power structures within academic inquiry. Chaudhry argues that scholarship produced using the first two methods is “bad scholarship,” whereas scholarship produced using the third method is “good scholarship.” In this article, I problematize the dichotomy between “good” and “bad” scholarship and argue that Chaudhry’s methodology is restrictive, hegemonic, and detrimental to meaningful scholarly engagement.

Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 2001

Students in the West who delve into the Islamic world face a paradox so blatant that it usually goes unnoticed: the concept of 'Islamic law' graces every page of their readings, but no one can show them where or how it actually exists. Instead of an Islamic law the researcher will ...

American Journal of Islam and Society, 2020

In this paper, I outline a propaedeutics of Islamic legal studies. I am using the term “propaedeutic” to refer to scholarship and pedagogy that introduces audiences to new material in a way that structures their curiosities and asks them to rethink commonplace familiar situations and assumptions. Those who teach about Islamic law in North American Islamic studies are working in an environment shaped by distinctive anxieties and preconceptions. Engaged schol- arship informed by thinkers such as Wael Hallaq and Talal Asad seeks to disentangle conceptions of law from modern expectations of law enforcement, codification, and the supervisory neutrality of the state to consider other deliberations and practices of justice. Such propaedeutic scholarship should suggest how religious legal authority deals with more than just “spiritual” and “personal” mat- ters. Imprecise introduction to the idea that Islamic legal opinion is non-binding can unintentionally imply that such opinion makes only moral suggestion that one chooses to follow or not. Schol- ars critical of Max Weber’s judgment that Islamic jurisprudence amounts to little more than arbitrary invocations of authority should be careful not to present Islamic jurists as merely creative- ly “free” to be unsystematic and their decisions inconsequential if following them is not coerced. Drawing on the work of Hussein Agrama, I explore the idea of fatwa discernment as guiding counsel directed not at adversarial procedure but at ethical self-formation. Finally, I consider Saba Mahmood’s account of religious difference to suggest how Islamic legal traditions might complicate liberal ideas of jurisdiction.

The American Journal of Comparative Law, 2004

Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture

The religious legitimation of patriarchy has been the subject of heated debates among Muslims since the 19th century, debates tainted with the legacy of colonialism and orientalism. For long, Islam and feminism have been perceived and portrayed as incompatible, and there is a plethora of literature and a host of arguments seeking to demonstrate this, both in the media and in academia. In the late 20th century, however, new forms of gender consciousness, activism, and scholarship have emerged that challenge patriarchy from within Muslim tradition have emerged, and have acquired the label ‘Islamic feminism’. Here I sketch the origins and development of this phenomenon, of which there are inevitably diverging accounts; and I shall argue that the struggle for gender equality in Muslim contexts is part of the larger struggle for social justice and democracy, intimately linked to a growing democratisation in the production of religious knowledge. I explore the potential of feminist voices...

bepress Legal Series, 2006

The United States recent deal with a United Arab Emirites Company to operate seven U.S. Ports highlights a growing tension in U.S. and Arabic commercial relations. One tension that has remained unnoticed is the role that U.S Courts play in interpreting Islamic texts when the commercial or legal outcome depends on an understanding of the religious culture. This article describes seven cases that demonstrate various approaches to this problem. This article utilizes an approach by James Boyd White, and suggests that translation or its kin transliteration can help judges in deciding Islamic legal principles. ARTICLE Robert Cover in his now famous (and controversial) article Nomos and Narrative began by informing us that we "inhabit a nomos-a normative universe." 1 By normative universe, Cover means to tell us that our world is constantly juxtaposed between principles of right and wrong-rights and wrongs that are intrinsically and inseparably connected to the narrative that forms them. 2 That narrative and norms compliment each other is nothing new; that narrative and norms create separate worlds of occupation that collide with one another in concrete and specific ways is another problem all together.

This book shows how hermeneutic theory and practice theory can be brought together to analyze cultural, legal, and religious traditions. These ideas are developed through an analysis of the Islamic legal tradition, which examines both Islamic legal doctrine and religious education. In terms of disciplinary orientation, the book combines anthropology and Islamicist history, utilizing both ethnography and in-depth analysis of Arabic religious texts. The book focuses on higher religious learning in contemporary Egypt, examining its intellectual, ethical, and pedagogical dimensions. Data is drawn from over two years of fieldwork inside al-Azhar University, Cairo University’s Dār al-ʿUlūm, and the network of traditional study circles associated with the al-Azhar mosque. Together these sites constitute the most important venue for the transmission of religious learning in the contemporary Muslim world. Although the book gives special attention to contemporary Egypt, it provides a broader ...

Islamic Law and Society, 2014

In this article, I combine textual research with ethnographic data collected at al-Azhar and Dār al-ʿUlūm to investigate how the modernization of traditional religious learning has transformed the character of Islamic legal doctrine. I argue that changes in educational techniques have produced a shift in “episteme”. Whereas traditional religious learning was dominated by language-based conceptions of knowledge, modern reforms have reoriented education towards new conceptions modeled on the natural sciences. This transformation has fundamentally altered patterns of legal reasoning, particularly with respect to ijtihād and taqlīd. I use these observations to urge a rethinking of the perspectives on ijtihād and taqlīd that currently structure Western research on Islamic legal history.

in Anver Emon and Rumee Ahmed (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2019

A historiography describing the relationship between Islamic law and theology in academic writing.