The Anthropology of Islamic Law: Education, Ethics, and Legal Interpretation at Egypt's Al-Azhar.

• Author: El-Tobgui, Carl Sharif

The Anthropology of Islamic Law: Education, Ethics, and Legal Interpretation at Egypt's Al-Azhar. By ARIA NAKISSA. Oxford Islamic Legal Studies. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. ix + 312. $95.

In The Anthropology of Islamic Law, Aria Nakissa takes us on a captivating and richly informative journey through the colorful and contested landscape of Islamic religious education in contemporary Egypt. Focusing on the Dar al-'Ulum faculty at Cairo University and, especially, the world-famous al-Azhar mosque-cum-university complex in the heart of Old Cairo, Nakissa meticulously documents how modern reforms, both institutional and pedagogical, have fundamentally altered the conception and transmission of Islamic religious knowledge over the past two centuries. Although the story of modernizing reforms in Egyptian religious education has been told before, Nakissa's insightful monograph sheds fresh light on the nature of Islamic legal education over time through the development and application of a sophisticated theoretical framework for understanding Islamic law and legal theory as a complex system of divine intentions. This framework is underpinned by extensive ethnographic field data and the careful interpretation of a wide array of Arabic source texts.

Nakissa's study consists of an introduction, four sections comprising a total of ten substantive chapters, and a summary conclusion. The first section expounds the work's theoretical orientation, which brings together two approaches that have enjoyed prominence in anthropological circles over the past century: hermeneutic theory, which has much in common with classical Islamicist approaches, and practice theory, which has eclipsed hermeneutic theory in anthropology and related disciplines in recent decades. Both hermeneutic theory and practice theory are concerned with the relationship between action and the mind, but they approach this relationship in different ways. According to conventional views, the mind contains one's beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, and so on. Hermeneutic theory is concerned with the process whereby we can examine people's actions in order to acquire knowledge of their minds. For instance, if we see that a woman buys vegetables, prays, and takes out her running shoes, we may infer from these actions that she has a desire to eat vegetables, a belief in God, and an intention to exercise. Practice theory, meanwhile, is concerned with how practices (that is, repeated actions) can alter an individual's mind by affecting the content of those beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions. For instance, through the practice of eating vegetables a man may develop a desire for vegetables, and through the...