What Can the Islamic Past Teach Us about Secular Modernity?

• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591715606876
• Subject Matter: Review Essay

Political Theory

2015, Vol. 43(6) 838 –849

© 2015 SAGE Publications

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Review Essay

What Can the Islamic

Past Teach Us about

Secular Modernity?

The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, by Wael

Hallaq. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt, by

Hussein Ali Agrama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Reviewed by: Andrew F. March, Yale University

DOI: 10.1177/0090591715606876

One of the primary hallmarks of the accelerated, compressed process of state

modernization in the Middle East was the transplant of foreign legal codes,

both by local modernizing elites and by colonial administrators. This hap-

pened in virtually every Muslim-majority country, from Morocco to

Indonesia, from the 1850s and continuing through the twentieth century.

In almost all of these countries, the norm was for family law to remain in

the hands of traditional religious courts, sometimes divided according to con-

fession. Yet, at the same time as Muslim countries were adopting or having

imposed on them legal transplants from Europe, they were also codifying

traditional Islamic law in certain select areas, particularly family and per-

sonal status, but also certain areas of the civil law. The best-known case is

that of the Ottoman Mecelle, a codification of Islamic civil law that entered

into force in 1877. In some cases, like the French in Algeria and the British in

India and Sudan, colonial administrators from Europe were the instigating

agents behind the codification of Islamic law for application in state-

administered courts.

The codification of Islamic law was not a trivial event. Islamic law had

always existed as a jurists’ and judges’ law, with norms developed over cen-

turies in legal manuals of varying length and in successive generations of

commentaries and super-commentaries on them. A sovereign state adopting

as its national law a single legal code, even if informed by traditional Islamic

legal rules, was a revolutionary transformation of the meaning and practice of

the shariʿa.

606876PTXXXX10.1177/0090591715606876Political TheoryReview Essay

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