Islam and the Rule of Justice: Image and Reality in Muslim Law and Culture.

• Author: Hussin, Iza
• Position: Book review

Islam and the Rule of Justice: Image and Reality in Muslim Law and Culture. By LAWRENCE ROSEN. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2018. Pp. xi + 279. $105 (cloth); $35 (paper and ebook).

Lawrence Rosen's Islam and the Rule of Justice opens by acknowledging the climate of prevalent "Western fears and misunderstanding... about Islamic law," and enumerates a series of common misperceptions about Islamic law, including its emphasis on tradition, rules, duties, and jihad, its reliance on brutal punishment, its bias against women and minorities, and, somewhat paradoxically, its domination by the state, the full discretion of judges, and the flexibility of jurisconsults in stark contrast to the inflexibility of courts. Rosen argues that seeing "Islamic law as a living system" (p. 3) allows for context, contingency, agency, culture, and meaning, and that each element of the book comes together to provide a "synoptic view" of Islamic law, embedded in culture (p. 12). He concludes the book by setting out a series of "cultural precepts" that emerge from this synoptic view, which might then be turned to a basis for new constitutional arrangements in North Africa and the Middle East: justice as equivalence, reciprocity and structured personalism, ambivalence to power, and property as trust (p. 179). The analytic project--a synoptic view that builds on selected vignettes from Islamic law as a lived system--is given political meaning, therefore, by this background of Western misperception and the foregrounding of political transformations in the wake of the Arab Spring.

The book is divided into two parts; the first, "Following the Law," comprises four chapters on everyday life in a Muslim court, women in Muslim family courts, "shadow law" in Morocco, and Muslim-Jewish partnerships, and the second, "Justice in an Imperfect World," is made up of four chapters on "The Culture of Corruption in the Arab World," "A Guide to the Arab Street," the middle class in the Middle East, and the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. Two chapters serve to draw out broader questions at the start and end of the book: "Approaching Islamic Law" begins with discussing "misperceptions of Islamic law," which the chapters aim to probe and contextualize, and "The Rule of Law or the Rule of Justice?" concludes the volume with a discussion of the significance of the concept of justice "in Arabs' individual and collective sentiments" (p. 167). While of uneven length, this introduction and...