What Can the Islamic Past Teach Us about Secular Modernity?

Review of Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernitys Moral
Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning
Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (University of
Chicago Press, 2012)
Andrew F. March
Yale University
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 happened in virtually every
Muslim-majority country, from Morocco to Indonesia, from the 1850s and continuing
through the 20th-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 confession. 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 personal status, but also certain areas of the civil law. The bestknown 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 centuries in legal manuals of
varying length and in successive generations of commentaries and super-commentaries
on them. For a sovereign state to adopt 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 sharia.
This is the historical context to the modern aspiration of many Muslims to restore the
sharia or create an Islamic state. However, while many Muslims imagine the
restoration of the sharia to promise a restoration of dignity, authenticity and faithfulness
to Muslim societies, very few call into question the agency and practices of the modern
state as a means to that restoration. What most Islamist actors and intellectuals envision is
a more legitimate lawmaking process that would increase the Islamic content of state
legal codes. What is almost never envisaged is a return to the status quo before the very
process of codification, whereby Islamic courts governed most areas of society using the
knowledge and practices developed over centuries in the traditional religious madrasas.
This hybrid politico-legal imagination is the context for Wael Hallaqs provocative book,
The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernitys Moral Predicament. Hallaq takes
as his object of critique the notion, shared by many Muslims and non-Muslims alike, that

a modern state can be regarded as Islamic if it applies Islamic legal norms to some
sufficient extent. Hallaqs argument, as signaled in the title and on practically every page
of the book, is that an Islamic state is not only practically impossible in modern social
and political conditions, but is a conceptualeven metaphysicaloxymoron. The
argument is very simple:
1. An Islamic state could only be a state ruled by sharia.
2. The rule of sharia is the informal rule of jurists according to their classical
methods based on a commitment to the legislative sovereignty of God.
3. The modern state by definition promulgates legal codes on the basis of its own
exclusive sovereignty.
4. Therefore, any conception of a modern Islamic state is inherently selfcontradictory (xi).
Much of Hallaqs book is devoted to proving premises 2 and 3. For Hallaq, it is only
coherent to speak of Islamic law in reference to the traditional practices and
epistemologies of Muslim jurists and scholars up to the 19th century. Similarly, the
modern state, and modernity as such, have certain core, essential attributes. The
Enlightenment philosophical paradigm, in particular its mechanistic view of nature and
the universe, its separation of fact from value, its belief in the autonomous self, and its
instrumental attitude toward nature, destroys any possible harmony between law,
morality, governance and human consciousness. Hallaq even asserts (dismissing not only
the first and last books of Platos Republic but a large amount of Islamic theology) that
the very question Why be moral? echoes a fundamental quandary of modernity and
the modern condition; it is a question that the mainstream Islamic tradition, in any of its
premodern variants, never asked[nor] did any other premodern culture (112). Modern
law is grounded everywhere solely on the arbitrary, amoral will of the state. The
combination of general moral groundlessness and the states regulatory, disciplinary and
surveillance powers gives shape to modernitys distinct experience of tyranny and
alienation. This is MacIntyre, only a little less gung-ho about modernity.
To be sure, Hallaq focuses attention on a real problem. No one will think about terms like
an Islamic state or applying the sharia un-self-consciously after reading this book.
Hallaq is absolutely right that as a paradigm of governance, [the modern state] evolved
in Europe [and] is uncomfortably seated in many parts of the world (156). He is
equally persuasive in noting how problematic the institutions of the modern state are for
Islamic law and how little attention political Islamists have devoted to the state as a
problem for Islam. Hallaq stands almost alone in arguing that Islam contains the
resources to resist and critique the regulatory and disciplinary powers of the state as such,
rather than merely coopt them for Islamic ends.
If the book remained on this terrainexploring the interaction of the modern state and
Islam as a problem to be understood in all its manifestations and points of contactit
would represent an unqualified contribution to contemporary scholarship. Unfortunately,
the polemical rationale of the book overwhelms its scholarly aims. His account of the
pre-modern Muslim past is stylized and mythic, rather than historiographical. Similarly,

his treatment of Western modernity contains much that is valuable and accurate but its
Ahabian focus on the state and its amoralism leaves little room for the exploration of any
alternative moral, legal and political currents in modernity, including practices of
governmentality that do not issue solely from the state.
Hallaqs case for the essential incompatibility of the modern state with Islam boils down
to two core claims: (1) that positive law, acquiring its authoritative force from the will of
the sovereign state, is radically incompatible with Islamic law and (2) that the
disciplinary and regulatory technologies of the modern state are un-Islamic, things never
done in the Muslim past and things Muslim authorities may not do. It is possible to raise
some questions about these two premises that Hallaq regards as practically self-evident.
First, Hallaq claims that in pre-modern Islam the ruler had no will of his own that gave
law its authority. This is true, but also an over-simplification. For both classical theory
and practice distinguished between two realms: the realm of governance (siyasa) and
the realm of the religious law (fiqh). The latter was indeed the exclusive domain of the
religious scholars. However, there are many areas of public, social and economic life for
which no specific Islamic religious rules exist, but where Muslim authorities are
permitted to act within broad moral constraints as long as their actions are justifiable as
advancing communal welfare (maslaha). Muslim dynasties also frequently sponsored a
particular legal school and made it the de facto official law of the state. The Ottomans,
well before colonialism, went as far as to promulgate formal codes (kanuns) in the realm
of siyasa left to the rulers by the religious law itself. Ottoman legal theorists even
declared that the Sultans will was the source of the legitimacy of such codes. While The
Impossible State ignores this dimension of pre-modern sharia-governance, Hallaq has
discussed it with great authority and expertise in some of his earlier books.1
This constitutional tradition of the pre-modern Islamic past does not invalidate Hallaqs
thesis, but it does complicate it. The siyasa/fiqh dichotomy qualifies heavily the idea that
Islamic governance was based purely on the apolitical rule of the sharia and raises
complex political questions about how to draw the line between those areas of life where
public authorities may act, coerce and legislate with only the broadest imprimatur of the
religious scholars, and those areas of life where the scholars must be allowed to
implement the sharia free from interference. Hallaq would respond that rulers did
have these siyasa powers but they were always constrained by the paradigmatic norms
and authority of the religious law. As ideal-theory this may be true, but legal historians
have shown in great detail that under such regimes as the Mamluks and the Ottomans it
was the religious jurists accommodating the rulers desires and prerogatives and not the
other way around.2

See, for example, Wael B. Hallaq, Sharia: Theory, Practice, Transformation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 200-221.
2
See Kristin Stilt, Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experiences in
Mamluk Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Colin Imber, Ebus-suud: The
Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

Historical legacies aside, what is the point in saying that all modern attempts to debate or
legislate on matters of public policy are definitionally and essentially incompatible with
the timeless meaning of sharia? Many modern Muslim scholars, intellectuals and pious
believers certainly dont think that, their knowledge of the rupture brought by modernity
notwithstanding. Many think that it is the obligation of Muslims in all times and places to
try to order their lives and societies in accordance with the most importance purposes and
priorities of Islam, recognizing historical changes and engaging dialectically with them.
Why not recognize from a scholarly perspective that in modernity Islamic law just is this
messy amalgam of what is found in the classical texts and what is pronounced by public
sharia counsels, legislatures, sharia-compatibility courts, civil courts and independent
religious authorities? Similarly, if some Muslims recognize that the modern state is here
to stay, for the time being, and seek to delineate a set of standards by which such a state
might be called Islamic, what exactly is gained by producing a syllogistic
demonstration that declares this impossible?
Of course, here Hallaq would claim that any modern efforts are doomed to fail because
they cannot recreate the moral hegemony of premodern Islam that wove the individual,
the family, the society, the market and the ruler into one harmonious tapestry. But even
here Hallaqs own vision seems itself to belong more to modernity than to premodern
Islamic paradigms. Most premodern Muslim thinkers did not think in terms of the the
social and did not necessarily hold that various spheres of life all depended on one
another for their validity or harmonious operation. Moreover, what Hallaq imagines to
characterize an ideal premodern orderequality, social justice, privacy, the rule of law
seems to reflect the norms of post-Enlightenment moderns as much as those of
premodern Muslims. After all, he is trying to persuade his contemporaries in the West
that the premodern Islamic society was a superior instance of a well-ordered society
(ix).
What about Hallaqs argument that the modern state routinely exercises powers that
according Islamic morality no authority, secular or religious, may exercise? This sounds
very persuasive in the abstractwho is going to defend the arbitrary power of the amoral
state to shape human subjects according to its own liking, with the specter of punishment
and surveillance lurking in the background? But if we take a look at some of the specific
areas where modern states exercise powerthe broad sphere of biopowerthings look
a little murkier.
Take the country with the loudest claim to be both Islamic and a statethe Islamic
Republic of Iran. (It must be noted here that The Impossible State hardly mentions by
name any single modern Muslim state or society.) The experience with Islamizing the
law in Iran after the revolution contains many lessons that validate Hallaqs analysis. In
many areas of the law, it was either extremely difficult to formulate rules from the
sharia or extremely costly to stick to them.3 Iran is an exemplary case of the
disillusionment with the ideological project of applying the sharia as the solution to
all of a states legitimacy deficits. But the Islamic Republic has also done many things as
3

See, in particular, Asghar Schirazi, The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the
Islamic Republic (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998).

public policy that Hallaq would diagnose as characteristic of modern state power. Postrevolutionary Iran has one of the most successful public health systems, including family
planning, of any country in the Middle East. Developing and implementing these policies
has involved the whole gamut of secular and religious power: religious fatwas from
scholars, official state legislation of policies as compatible with sharia, legislating on the
basis of public welfare, the technologies of bureaucratic regulation and discipline, the
biopolitical rhetoric of the health of society, and so on.4
How would Hallaqs analysis help us to study biopower and the sharia-politics of public
health in post-revolutionary Iran? Would he say that whatever came out of the nominally
sharia-compliant institutions of the Iranian regime is tainted by its association with state
power? But what about fatwas and religious judgments from seminaries outside the state?
Would he say that the state is nonetheless exercising power that was never authorized by
the classical sharia? Well, this either means that the state is then acting on the basis of
public welfare (maslaha), which is a part of the sharia, or that these are areas where the
state is absolutely forbidden by the sharia from acting. But the latter answer strikes me
as very implausible on its face, and also to be a strange presumption vis--vis Muslims
looking to act in areas like public health. Would Hallaq say, perhaps, that public
authorities are authorized by the sharia to act in the area of public health but not to do
certain things or use certain modern state technologies? Well, which ones and how do we
know? I am not convinced that declaring specific practicesor the whole networkof
modern state practices as simply un-Islamic is the most useful or subtle category for
scholarly purposes.
Turning briefly then to Hallaqs characterization of the paradigmatic Muslim past. His
account is in places quite useful, but a few doubts arise here as well. Hallaqs claim is
that pre-modern Muslim societyeverywhere for twelve centurieswas
paradigmatically organic, well-ordered, independent from the state (which didnt exist
anyway) and in harmonious congress with the moral laws of the universe, which were
expressed in the social laws of the sharia.
The least that can be said here is that a sympathetic and eager reader might have wished
for more references to socio-historical studies to follow up on the study of this precolonial Muslim past in addition to the textual juridical references Hallaq provides. But it
is clear that this semi-mythical account of the paradigmatic Muslim past has no real space
for conflict, contestation or suppressed alternatives, that is, for the study of the exercise
of power in premodern Islam. It is a place without history. All Muslims were
harmoniously woven into their paradigmatic society and pious subjectivity, and any
departures from this were solely matters of human imperfection, not actual moral or
spiritual conflict or disagreement.
Is this kind of critique of modernity good for the Muslims? If the price of critiquing
both the tyrannies of the modern state and the superficiality of some modern Islamist
4

See Homa Hoodfar and Samad Assadpour, The Politics of Population Policy in the Islamic
Republic of Iran, Studies in Family Planning 31.1 (2000), pp. 19-34.

demands to apply the sharia is to construct an Islamic normativity that must at all
costs be the opposite of whatever we think Western modernity represents, then we might
ask whether it is worth it. The response to complacent triumphalism about the moral
superiority of Western modernity does not need to consist in creating flattened, mirrorimage paradigms of what the Muslim world was like before Napoleon.
After all, what is really preventing a restoration of the unchallenged, hegemonic authority
of the sharia in modernity? While Hallaq begins with the assumption that to say that
the overwhelming majority of modern Muslims wish for the Shara to return in one form
or another is to state what anyone with even a cursory knowledge of world affairs would
readily acknowledge and that the contradiction lies only in their wish to restore it within
the framework of the modern state (x), it seems equally worth exploring the idea that
Muslim-majority societies are characterized by the same fundamental challenge of
pluralism as other modern societies.
It is probably true that for the great majority of Muslims today, the Shara remains a
source of religious and moral authority (x). But Muslims disagree radically on what this
implies and who they want to speak in the name of the sharia. For many, this kind of
pluralism is itself a tragedy that Muslims only have to face because of colonialism.
Hallaq does not make this claim, because he does not address the fact of pluralism and
the competition of political-moral visions at all. But, if he is right that an Islamic state is
an impossibility today, that is more likely to be because of the combination of moral
pluralism in Muslim societies and the irrelevance or inadequacy of the premodern Islamic
legal rulings (not principles) for most social and economic policy areas, as the postrevolutionary experience of Iran suggests. For Hallaq, it is the disciplinary, regulatory
and surveillance powers of the modern state, anchored in the Enlightenment mentality of
instrumental rationality and the Is/Ought distinction, that prevents the public world from
being morally grounded. But, for all that his book aims at exploring modernitys moral
predicament, Hallaq does not recognize the distinctive conditions of moral argument in
modernity. He does not take seriously the distinction between morality (what we owe
others as a matter of justice) and ethics (care of the self), and thus does not discuss the
possibility that any modern legal and political projects might aim at morality in the
former sense while acknowledging multiple ethical projects in the latter sense. There is
no recognition that in modernity there might be reasonable disagreement about ethics,
even for Muslims or those living in Muslim countries. Hallaq just assumes that for
Muslims to be estranged from the premodern sharia-Gemeinschaft is to be alienated as
such. But what if actually existing inhabitants of Muslim societies think otherwise?
*
The critical study of the application of Islamic legal norms in modern states is the central
theme also of Hussein Ali Agramas fascinating Questioning Secularism: Islam,
Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt. Agramas book is based partly on
textual readings of some recent adventures in Islamic law in Egypt and partly on
ethnographic fieldwork in Egyptian family law courts and the al-Azhar Fatwa Council. It
is thus an excellent complement to Hallaqs The Impossible State. But Agramas book is

different in two key ways: first, there is no explicit normative agenda, either with regard
to the meaning of Islamic law or to the powers of the modern state; second, whereas
Hallaq takes modernity at-large as his historical and analytic frame, Agrama is
interested in secular power as the core problem in studying how Islamic law operates in
the modern world.
The book ranges energetically over a number of issues and sites of moral and legal
contestation in modern Egypt. He first analyzes the famous case of Nasr Hamid Abu
Zayd, Cairo University professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies who was legally divorced
from his wife by the courts on the grounds that he had become an apostate from Islam
through his academic writings on the Quran. Agrama focuses on the puzzle of how a
secular state like Egypt can enforce the legal provision from classical Islamic law
(hisba) that all Muslims are their brothers keepers in religious morality (Ch. 1).
Subsequent chapters (2-5) present Agramas fieldwork at personal status courts and at the
al-Azhar Fatwa Council, studying the practice and production of both official court
verdicts and non-binding Islamic religious legal opinions (fatwas). These powerful
chapters use the ethnographic material to ask questions about publicity and secrecy,
public order and the family, suspicion, authority, the rule of law, tradition, legal reform
and (obligatorily) the care of the self. Finally, Agrama analyzes the language of justice
employed by Islamist lawyers operating within the Egyptian emergency state, arguing
that the politicized religiosity used by these lawyers is less an alternative to secularism
than an expression of the options enabled by the Egyptian states authority over religion.
These chapters are all very rich in invaluable ethnographic fieldwork and astute analysis
of the complex legal terrain in Egypt. Any student of Islamic law, secularism or the
sociology of the modern postcolonial state will benefit from this book and I hope it will
be widely read. Particularly persuasive are Agramas investigations into the various ways
in which religion is treated as a problem for public order, and thus a constant site for the
expansion of the states sovereign power, and his claim that the most successful sites of
resistance to secular power are, ironically, those liberalized practices of sharia that
evade the state by not engaging it (25).
The books central aim is to investigate secularism not as a normative ideal, set of
doctrines or constitutional system, but as a distinct kind of power with its own particular
questions and paradoxes. Agramas project is to ask how does secularism work to
support or undermine the concepts, sensibilities, assumptions, and behaviors of the
secular that it draws upon and depends upon?...How does secularism, as a form of power,
work? And what work does it do upon the behaviors, attitudes, and ways of knowing that
constitute our ways of life?(2) Note that Agrama does not refer to something like the
discourse of secularism, secularism as an ideological horizon or secularism as a set
of legal or constitutional constraints. There is a frequent reification of secularism and
secular power throughout the book. Agrama often portrays secular power neither as
something deployed by agents or institutions nor as a Foucaultian relationship, but as an
agent that itself acts directly on the world.

Other times Agramas programmatic statements about how to study secularism are more
persuasive. His overall research question restates the approach in much recent work on
secularism in anthropology and social theory that secularism is less about the simple
separation of religion and politics than about the fashioning of religion as an object of
continual management and intervention, and the shaping of religious life and sensibility
to fit the presuppositions and ongoing requirements of liberal governance (20). Or:
secularism is a set of processes and structures of power wherein the question of where to
draw the line between religion and politics continually arises and acquires a distinctive
salience (27).
It is the distinctive salience that is crucial. Agrama rightly acknowledges that the
boundary between the sacred and the secular arises in many political systems and
ideologies (including medieval Islamic ones). But we should speak of secularism when
this boundary is invested with enormous stakes and the answers to it are thus seen to
have inescapable consequences for how essential freedoms are identified, selves and their
motives defined, and ways of life can be lived (27). It is the ongoing, deepening
entanglement in the question of religion and politics, for the purpose of identifying and
securing fundamental liberal rights and freedoms (29) that is secularism.
This makes sense, but still raises a few questions. Is the secular management of religion
in Mubaraks Egypt, late-socialist Yugoslavia, Fifth Republic France and the 21st-century
United States all part of the same project of liberal governance? This seems to be a
deep ambiguity of this book, particularly because some of Agramas richest sections are
where he is investigating how secular rationales enable the state to expand its own
sovereign power without even the pretense of protecting liberal values, indeed where the
state describes itself as protecting Islam as part of its public order. This ambiguity
might have been avoided by defining secularism as the ongoing, deepening
entanglement in the question of religion and politics, for the purpose of identifying and
securing the interests and stability of state power. In this way, we might avoid the
circularity of having to answer the question of why it is secular power operating to
control religion in Egypt, but not in Iran or Saudi Arabia, when it is precisely the prior
secular nature of the Egyptian state that Agrama wants to query.
Agramas framing thus produces a definite to a person with a hammer everything looks
like a nail quality to the book. If committed liberal secularists tend to see religious folk
as the ones stirring up trouble in the public sphere and encroaching on the rights and
freedoms of others, Agramas response is that these incidents only arise as conflicts about
religion because of the way secular power constructs the boundary between politics and
religion as a problem. For Agrama it is not enough to say that secularism is one
distinctive way of politicizing religion, rather than a separation of religion and politics.
Rather, it is secularism itself that makes religion into an object of politics and under
secularism it becomes possible to impugn the authority of a religious claim by saying
that it is really made for political reasons (33). It is ambitious enough to explore the
distinctively secular politicizations of religion and religious claims without making the
easily refutable claim that secularism alone makes this possible. And does Agrama think

that it is not common to impugn the sincerity of religious claims in politics from within
non-secular discourse?
One clear example of the limitations of Agramas approach is his reading of the Abu
Zayd case and the practice of hisba in Islamic law. Up until the Abu Zayd case, it was a
curious feature of Egyptian law that private persons could bring suits against other
private persons on grounds of violating religious morality. (After the Abu Zayd case the
law was changed to restrict this prerogative to the state.) This reflects something quite
profound about Islamic notions of power and sovereignty. While ultimate sovereignty
belongs to God, the execution of that sovereigntycommanding right and forbidding
wrongis seen as dispersed in the Muslim community at large, even at the level of the
individual pious Muslim. There is a radical populism in the Islamic theocratic imaginary.
Instead of just seeing hisba as a religiously-derived feature of Egypts complex legal
system that sits uneasily with other aspects of that system, Agrama wants to observe how
the operation of hisba within the state legal system is evidence of the logic of secular
power in Egypt. Describing how hisba works in the Egyptian legal system promises to
tell us much about the particularities of this specific legal system, and Agrama more than
delivers.
But Agrama wants to do more than show that the litigation of hisba in modern Egypt
produces its own novel and bizarre forms of law-making, and this is a prime example of
where I think he overstates his case to make a point about secular power. For Agrama,
hisba, in its classical Sharia elaborations, was part of a form of reasoning and practice
connected to the cultivation of selves (20), a practice solely aimed at producing the
right fears and desiresa disciplined practice of moral criticism intended to produce
proper Muslim selves (64). In contrast, in the [modern Egyptian] courts it became
focused on the maintenance and defense of interests aimed at protecting the public order
(20). This binary (which feels heavily scripted) is very strongly stated and Agramas case
that we should interpret the adjudication of hisba cases not as a religious feature of
Egyptian law but primarily as an exercise of secular power rests entirely on its viability.
This is because he sees any adjudication in the name of public order as a distinctively
secular rationale for sovereign power.
Unfortunately, this is a highly selective and motivated reading of the uses of hisba in
classical Islamic law, relying on only two sources and neglecting the main canonical
treatments from the Islamic tradition. As a result, Agramas account confuses the ethics
of hisba when undertaken by a private individual with all the circumstances in which the
Muslim community is called upon to command the right and forbid the wrong. It is true
that classical treatments of hisba focus on the proper ethical requirements, dispositions
and objectives for Muslims who might consider taking it upon themselves to enforce
public morality. But that is far from incompatible with public order figuring as one of the
rationales for enforcing morality, especially when done by courts, market inspectors or
other public officials. Indeed, the most prominent classical Islamic thinkers who wrote on
hisba (not cited by Agrama) insist that commanding right and forbidding wrong is the
single foundational principle of all Islamic political authority, from the Caliphate to the

market inspector. Their writings do not conform to the binaries Agrama offers us, as they
are concerned with both religious virtue (proper Muslim selves) and the public order,
public welfare (maslaha, pace Agrama (66)), collective interests and, where necessary,
the juridical enforcement of these through proper procedures. Agramas story about the
particular kinds of public order rationales mobilized in Egyptian courts by particular
kinds of officials is interesting and rich enough without exaggerating the purely ethical
features of the pre-modern sharia discourse on hisba in order to support his narrative
about secular power as inaugurating the completely novel adjudication of Islamic
morality in the name of public order.
Thus, the move from close ethnography to broader critical claims is sometimes marred in
this book by a thin and simplistic reading of pre-modern Islamic discourses not supported
by sufficient research. Another puzzling example is when he refers to the concept of
zulm (injustice, tyranny) as not an explicitly Islamic concept (212)to make a point
that it is the secular state producing a language around the rule of law where the norm
and the exception blurdespite the fact that zulm appears seven times in the Quran,
and words derived from the same root appear in various forms no less than (roughly) 315
times. Agrama is also often quick to refer to certain scenarios as paradoxes when a
close reading shows that he means something like tragedy, dilemma or even
challenge. But I want to stress that Agramas book contains very sophisticated and
valuable discussions of how courts in Egypt produce complex discourses around
sincerity, authenticity, trust and threats to public order, particularly when they deal with
matters perceived as religious. While I do not agree with all of Agramas conclusions and
interpretations, this book should be emulated in the way that it opens up creative research
questions and moves skillfully between Islamic law as a textual-doctrinal tradition and a
living language of justice, ethics and sociability.
*
These two books are read together quite profitably. They both contribute substantially to
scholarship on the way that the powers of the modern state are not merely a neutral
resource that can be put to various ideological ends. They also both provide stark
reminders (if any were needed) of the costs of undemocratic political systems on the
development of legitimate and locally accepted legal meanings and of the lost promise of
2011. I hope that they will be read both for their own wealth of scholarship and also in
order to provoke further reflection on how we should (and shouldnt) draw on past
traditions to critique present practices. Can we study the effects of power and reflect on
historical loss without mythic, scripted or selective portrayals of the past?

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