Review: The Impossible State: A Discussion of Wael Hallaq's "Islam, Politics, and

Modernity's Moral Predicament"

Reviewed Work(s): The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament
by Wael Hallaq
Review by: IZA HUSSIN, NATHAN J. BROWN and NEGUIN YAVARI
Source: Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June 2014), pp. 461-467
Published by: American Political Science Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43279923
Accessed: 10-09-2019 07:43 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

American Political Science Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Perspectives on Politics

This content downloaded from 27.63.128.110 on Tue, 10 Sep 2019 07:43:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Review Symposium

The Impossible State

A Discussion of Wael Hallaq's Islam,
Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament
The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament. By Wael B. Hallaq. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012. 272p. $37.50 cloth.

In his new book The Impossible State : Islámy Politics , and Modernity's Moral Predicament , Wael B. Hallaq argues that
"The Islamic State/ judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both an impossibility and
a contradiction in terms/' In developing this argument Hallaq draws upon his extensive body of work as a scholar of Islam,
including most notably his Sharia: Theory, Practice , Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2009). At the same
time, Hallaq contributes to debates in political theory about the nature of the modern state. As part of our new
"Undisciplined'' format, this symposium seeks to bring a range of disciplinary perspectives into a discussion of this timely
and important argument. We have invited a number of scholars from different intellectual backgrounds to share their
views on the book as a contribution to the understanding of modern Islam, and also to reflect on how this work adds to our
understanding of the relationship between religion and politics.

IZA HUSSIN Hallaq brought about the "structural death" of the

doi:1 0.1 01 7/S1 53759271 4000966
"shari'a episteme" (ibid., p. 15). Hallaq's project in The
Impossible State is both more wide-ranging in its coverage
Where does the shari'a belong in the future of the Muslim
and more deeply critical of the modern project itself.
state? The Arab uprisings and waves of constitutional
reform in recent years have focused scholarly attentionAmong
on its many achievements, this book brings a
detailed and impassioned exploration of key debates in
the delicate balance to be struck between shari'a content
Islamic law and governance into sustained conversation
and democratic process, rule of law and pluralism. Wael
with canonical texts in Western political and legal theory,
Hallaq has in recent work written against the grain of this
challenging prevailing popular and scholarly tendencies
trend, outlining a vision of the shari'a as a worldview to
to particularize
counter the modern nation state and its version of rule of the former and universalize the latter.
law. An ambitious work of moral philosophy and historical
For Hallaq, both Islamic governance and the modern
state project are products of particular historical trajecto-
critique, The Impossible State presents a systematic develop-
ment of the thesis that the modern state and Islamic ries and represent distinct and divergent political futures.
He contrasts the concept of rule of law in the nation state
governance are radically incommensurable. This incommen-
and Islamic governance, arguing that the supremacy of
surability is not simply a confirmation of fundamental
differences between Muslims and Westerns, but a foundation the shari'a in the Islamic paradigm privileges a ""thick"
conception of rule of law" (p. 72) over the state. Rather
for interrogating the moral vacuity of the modern project.
than seeing the modern state as a politically neutral form
Here, Hallaq builds upon themes raised in his 2009
work, Shan a: Theory, Practice, Transformations , whose
that might contain a plethora of religious and moral
content, he argues that two developments in the modern
project was to trace the development of the shari'a from the
state project, "the rise of the legal" and the "rise of the
"synthetic legal tradition" ( Sharia , p. 18) of the Near East,
political" (p. 75), effectively evacuated the modern state of
through its institutional elaborations, and into its profound
the moral and ethical content necessary to Islamic gover-
and catastrophic transformation through processes of
nance. Further, the modern state and Islamic governance
modern state formation, processes that according to
are productive of different disciplines and subjectivities:
" homo modernus " (p. 104) and " homo moralisn (p. 138).
These three differences alone spell the impossibility of an
Iza Hussin is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Islamic state as a variant of the modern nation state, but to
University of Chicago (hussin@uchicago.edu). drive the point home further, Hallaq argues that the

©American Political Science Association 2014 June 2014 | Vol. 12/No. 2 461

This content downloaded from 27.63.128.110 on Tue, 10 Sep 2019 07:43:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Review Symposium | The Impossible State

contemporary global and capitalist order itself is inimical pre-modern Muslim societies (pp. 52-58). Rather than
to the establishment and maintenance of a viable Islamic
simply marking divergences between paradigms, the key
state.
concepts Hallaq raises as points of comparison - separation
The violent historical encounter between the modern
of powers, sovereignty, authority, subjectivity - each also
state project and Islamic governance provides themark
central
critical lines of tension between paradigm and history.
Perhaps the more pressing analytic question might
drama of Hallaq's argument, but the book's characteriza-
tion of this encounter also raises some problematictherefore
issues. be how the internal resources of Islamic
The author theorizes the encounter between Muslims and
governance function to ameliorate these tensions, and
here a sense of Muslim engagements with the dissonance
the modern state in terms that locate agency unequivocally
in the hands of the modern West: "Modernity,between
whose their experience and aspirations, in diverse times
hegemonic discourse is determined by the institutions and might have provided further clarity.
and places,
intellectuals of the powerful modern West, has not offered
This reading of the relationship between paradigm and
a fair shake to two-thirds of the world's population
history could also work to strengthen what may be the
book's seminal contribution to both Islamic and Western
who have lost their history and, with it, their organic
ways of existence" (pp. 3-4). Contemporary Muslims
legal and political theory: its vision of how law might be
face a "dissonance between their moral and cultural theorized beyond modernity and the nation state. Hallaq
aspirations . . . and the moral realities of the modernputs forward a vision of law embedded in an episteme,
world . . . realities with which they must live but that a cosmology, and a praxis. In the modern project, law is the
were not of their own making" (p. 3). expression of sovereign will, and this sovereignty is
Hallaq's commitment to moral resources as a paththeorized as popular sovereignty but exercised by a godlike
forward would seem to have less potential if modernity is state, without which the law is unimaginable and
hegemonic and agency has been denied to Muslims. unintelligible (pp. 29-34). The development of modern
Fortunately, it is unclear whether the Muslim commitment legality in conjunction with the state has further
to the modern nation state is now, or has ever been, as exacerbated the disengagement of law from morality
whole-hearted as Hallaq assumes (p. 75). The acceptance ofand society (p. 83). He argues that the unity between
the state model in modern Islamic political and legal the modern state and law "does not meet the standards
thought might be read more often than not as a vehicle of Islamic governance" (p. 38); "in the shari'a, the legal is
for Muslim political aspirations, and the relationshipthe instrument of the moral, not the other way around"
between Muslims and the modern state as one of continual(p. 10). When the moral is taken as the "central domain"
struggle rather than hegemony. The dissonance that Hallaq(p. 7), a renewed understanding of law and its potential
finds between Muslim aspirations and modern realities hasemerges, law as integral to the project of moral gover-
functioned as a point of departure for a wide range of nance, "attentive to the spiritual-moral self, to family and
modern Islamic thought and Muslim politics, but such iscommunity, to economic equitability, and ... to the
the force of modernity for Hallaq, that the contrast can onlyenvironment" (p. 198, n. 99).
properly be made between premodern Islam and the In the paradigm of Islamic governance, the paramount
modern state. activity is striving (literally, "jihad"; p. 11) towards the
Some critiques of Hallaq's recent work revolve around moral, a "foundational and structural impulse. .. [to]
his tendency to contrast Islam and the shari'a in their idealdiscover God's moral will." From this, the legal method-
formulations with the historical experience of the modernology of ijtihad follows, a process that yields law that is
state. Hallaq argues that the purpose of focusing on the "inherendy multiple and probabilistic" (p. 58), a rule of
"paradigm" of Islamic governance is not to deny itslaw to which all actors in the state are subservient. This
workings in the world, but to seek to understand how vision of "highly meaningful rule of law" (p. 74), a worked
"paradigmatic discourses and practices . . . [persisted] in in combination with legal actors and institutions embed-
the continual re-creation of a particular order" (p. 11). Atded in local civil society, and depended upon willing
times, the distinction between legal theory and historical individual submission to the law, cultivated by performa-
experience remains unclear - as in the discussion oftive and affective aas (p. 118). When contrasted with that
separation of powers in the modern state (pp. 38-48), of the modern state, Hallaq argues, "Islamic governance
when the target of Hallaq's critique is the Euro-American emerges ... as a distincdy more favorable expression of just
state, the United States, and/or the nation-state, its legal and democratic rule" (p. 74).
theory, its institutional makeup, and/or its empirical The book makes a further contribution to religion and
failings. This slippage makes it hard to evaluate thepolitics scholarship by historicizing the commonly made
comparative bases of some of Hallaq's claims about Islamic distinction between the ritual and ethico-legal elements of
governance, adjudication and society, particularly when it is Islam. Hallaq makes the key point that categorical divisions
likewise unclear when Hallaq refers to the theoretical logicbetween ibadat ("religious works"; p. 216) and muamalat
of Islamic institutions, and when to their workings in ["laws and transactions . . . between people"; p. 217)

462 Perspectives on Politics

This content downloaded from 27.63.128.110 on Tue, 10 Sep 2019 07:43:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
reinscribe a false (Enlightenment) dichotomy between the
ritual and the legal elements of the shari'a. This false
dichotomy has fueled an understanding of the shari'a as
a system lacking in efficacy and incapable of enforcement -
and therefore in need of colonial and national state inter-
ventions. Scholarship on "Islamic law," a category that
itself derived from assumptions about the divisibility of
law from other domains of life and governance, often
replicates these assumptions (p. 113). The sections that
elaborate the relationship between ibadat and mu'amalat
as mutually constitutive components in the shari'a
system have a grace and coherence that themselves go
much of the way to communicating - stylistically and
substantively - the gap between modern state law and
the moral law of the shari'a, not just as varieties of legal
logic, but as ways of being in the world (pp. 1 18-135).
Here, Hallaq makes a tantalizing case for understanding
the shari'a as a "field of practical mysticism" (p. 137),
making Islamic governance not merely a system of law
and morality, but a unified worldview and pragmatic
field "that did not distinguish . . . between the meanings of
the legal, the moral and the mystical" (p. 138).
The Impossible State makes an important theoretical
contribution to both Islamic legal studies and contemporary
critiques of the modern project. For scholars of religion,
politics and law, Hallaq presents a challenge to think about
law not merely as an outcome of politics, but as critically
constitutive and generative of political thought, institu-
tions and repertoires. At a time when the futures of many
Muslim states are in flux, this work makes a provocative
case for the depth and potential of "Islamic moral
resources" (p. 13) to show the way forward, even as it
argues that "[f]or Muslims today to seek the adoption of
the modern state system ... is to bargain for a deal
inferior to the one they secured for themselves over the
centuries of their history" (p. 72).

June 2014 | Vol. 12/No. 2 463

This content downloaded from 27.63.128.110 on Tue, 10 Sep 2019 07:43:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Review Symposium | The Impossible State

NATHAN J. BROWN His paradigms are not timeless, however; they are socially
doi:1 0.1 01 7/S1 53759271 4000978
and historically created. And they can die.
In this book, Wael Hallaq at first seems to take aim Inat short, Hallaq is concerned with the essence of the
modern state, on the one hand, and the Islamic shari'a,
Islamist political movements with his claim that "any
on the other, after all of their accidental variations,
conception of a modern Islamic state is inherently self-
accretions, and distorted applications are stripped away.
contradictory' (p. ix; emphasis in the original). And indeed,
How does the author decide what is paradigmatic
Hallaq does dismiss much of the Islamist project, which he
in modernity, the West, and the state? What are the
sees as Islamizing society through the state. His book misses
the mark a bit in that effort. But that is largely because"fondamental
his structures or properties that the state has in
true targets are far broader: modernity, the West, andreality
the possessed for at least a century and without which it
state - terms that he sees as inextricably linked. could never be conceived of as a state, being that essential "
(p. 21; emphasis original)? Hallaq turns to many critics of
The Impossible State is an audacious book. It is also
erudite in its engagement with various bodies of writingmodernity and the state, but perhaps no voice speaks
louder than that of Carl Schmitt. The modern state "exists
and entire disciplines. Should it be interesting to political
for its own sake"; it is "a means to no other end" with its
scientists? I think so, but only in a much more modest way
than the author intends. own supremacy "the highest value, which the citizen must
always privilege." Possessing absolute sovereignty, the
Hallaq's critique of modernity rests on an essentialism
so sweeping that most students of politics will find modern
it state is predicated on the "sacrifice of the citizen"
because
unhelpful. But in the process of arguing from essences, he the state is more precious than life (p. 28).
Demonstrating his historical understanding, Hallaq dis-
gives a sympathetic view of the Islamic shari'a that will
misses anything he deems "utopian or futuristic," instead
help many appreciate how it has been understood, pursued,
focusing on "the real, existing, and paradigmatic state"
and practiced - and why it continues to have appeal even
in the midst of a modern state system. In that way,(p. he 21), suggesting that actual injustices committed by
modern
(unintentionally) provides an extremely brief and limited but states are part of their essence and not accidental.
useful way to understand the Islamist resurgence. And indeed, the modern state, with its "exclusively
European" (p. 3) genealogy, is capable of an enormous
Let us begin with Hallaq's essentialism. He does use the
amount of killing, domination, and destruction.
word "essence" on occasion, but he prefers "paradigmatic"
instead: "In our account of paradigm, what is involved isWhen
a he turns to the Islamic shari'a, Hallaq seems to
subtly (and only implicitly) shift his method; rather than
system of knowledge and practice whose constituent domains
share in common a particular structure of concepts that qual-
examine actions, he stresses institutions and discourses.
itatively distinguish them from other systems of the same There is an element of modernization theory in reverse
here;
species" (p. 8). There, are of course, discordant, irregular, or not only is the Islamic shari'a essentially different,
abnormal elements within any domain, but they subvert the it is also better than modernity in its provision of
but
paradigm and are not part of it - and if they ever become justice, protection of the weak, and insistence on holding
dominant, then they form the basis for a new paradigm.those in power accountable to moral standards that they
Historical departures from the paradigm do not touch themselves cannot set. It was not necessarily unique in this
respect: "Premodern societies - i.e., prestate social forma-
its essence; for the Islamic shari'a, for instance: "The mess
of social reality - the victimized child, the robbed trader, and outside of Europe . . . differed from one another
tions
the overtaxed peasant - could always rely on a hegemonic significandy, yet for all their dissimilarities, they still
moral system that did its best to address the reality. That differed
it considerably more from the discipline and order
was not always successful is a fact that we should take for of the modern state's social creation" (pp. 98-99).
granted - for perfect success is the lot of no society, past orYet again, Hallaq is not ahistorical; the Islamic shari'a
present - but the paradigmatic efficacy of the moral dis- was formed sociologically and historically. But paradoxi-
position cannot be questioned" (p. 11; emphasis original). cally, it was precisely because the Islamic shari'a promised
The reference to "reality" and "fact" at variance with to be good for all times and places that it was applied by
those who were guided by particular social needs and
paradigms should not mislead. Hallaq's paradigms
themselves are not mere names but are quite real overriding
for goals. Its primary concern "was the regulation,
on moral grounds, of social and economic relations" (p. 59).
him (he refers at one point to the " reality " of the "legal
culture" of a Muslim jurist (p. 73; emphasis original). Many other scholars have noted that when discourses,
institutions, and practices deriving from the Islamic
shari'a operate in the context of the modern state, they
do so in a very different manner; Hallaq has contributed to
Nathan J. Brown is Professor of Political Science and that realization in past works in some stark ways. But in
this book he goes farther. Not only does he declare the
International Affairs at The George Washington University
(nbrown@gtvu.edu). Islamic shari'a "institutionally defunct" (p. 13), and not

464 Perspectives on Politics

This content downloaded from 27.63.128.110 on Tue, 10 Sep 2019 07:43:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
only is it clear that the modern state is the murderer. Muslims and continuing up until the modern era. He is far
The modern state and the Islamic shan a are fundamentally more respectful of the tradition than Sayyid Qutb; indeed,
and absolutely incompatible because of the difference in it is there, and not in the original revelations, that he finds
their essences. There is an odd echo of Sayyid Qutb's claim , the Islamic shari'a's essence.
that all existing societies are jahili (operating in pre-Islamic In another sense, however, Hallaq is even more radical.
ignorance) because they involve domination of man by man Sayyid Qutb and his defenders insist that he was decrying
rather than rule in accordance with God's instructions existing societies as non-Islamic, but he was not interested
(though there are, as we shall see, two critical differences in questioning the status of individual Muslims. For
between Sayyid Qutb and Hallaq). Hallaq, however, the end of the Islamic shari'a has very
This is a radical claim; it is also one that most political dire consequences: " There is no Muslim identity without this
scientists will find unhelpful precisely because it is so ethic ' (p. 70; emphasis original).
extreme and essentialist. Hallaq is dismissive of anything That leaves Muslims in a difficult position indeed.
How are they to lead Muslim lives when the path devel-
that departs from his absolutes: The separation of powers
is chimerical; the rule of law and democracy "must be oped to do so has been permanently blocked? Hallaq does
called into question" (p. 47). Only globalization might not quite abandon them; while he does not think the
temper the modern state (he speculates on this issue but Islamic shari'a can be revived, in the book's final pages
issues no definitive judgment), but if it does, the resulting he suggests some signposts on the road to a recovery of
tension is likely to produce unstable results. parts of its virtues. In keeping with his claims, that road
Yes, if one draws one's understanding of the state from does not run through the modern state but around it.
fascism, one will be repulsed. And if one's understanding He suggests quite briefly that Muslims experiment with
of an Islamic society is as absolutist as Sayyid Qutb's, the new (and unspecified) forms of governance and that they
fundamental incompatibility is obvious. But what is "engage with their Western counterparts with respect to
gained by talking not of tensions, contradictions, hybridity, the necessity of positioning the moral as the central
appropriation, even mongrelization but instead of absolute domain" (p. 169).
incompatibility and impossibility? Of course there is The sudden intrusion of (admittedly guarded and
a tension between the modern state and the Islamic shari'a qualified) optimism suggests that Hallaq may have been
as it was historically practiced and understood. But so is too dismissive of Islamist movements, or indeed insuf-
there tension between some practices associated with some ficiently attentive to much of what modern Muslims say,
modern states and liberalism, republicanism, constitution- think, and do. It is true that some movements have focused
alism, Catholicism, and many other ideas and approaches on reforming the states that govern them along Islamic lines
that seem to operate (hardly unchanged) in the modern and that these efforts have brought different and fewer fruits
world. Few scholars would find such categorical thinking than their proponents expected. But Islamism is a far more
useful or interesting. varied phenomenon that can be used to describe a large
What many should find helpful is Hallaq's brief family of approaches designed to ensure that individual
portrayal of how the Islamic shari'a was understood and Muslims and the broader society can live in accordance with
practiced. Here he departs from the extremely general divinely sanctioned moral instructions. And there are a host
nature of his argument to delve into some details of the of other approaches that Muslims have developed in the
system he finds so admirable. The details themselves are of modern world in an effort to live by Islamic principles.
less interest - and most readers will not be able to assess his Some might be helped by particular state policies; others
claims - but the picture of the Islamic shari'a that emerges might be hindered. But those approaches are real, they are
from them gives us a far better understanding of how issues followed, and they have consequences.
that might seem to some eyes as quite distinct - such as Hallaq begins his book by posing the question "what
prayer and business transactions - can form part of a single type of political rule are Muslims presently adopting or
moral/legal discourse; how the Islamic shari'a can be likely to adopt in the future?" But he quickly describes this
understood as a total system rather than as a series of legal as "a separate field of enquiry for another book and
rules; and how it can be understood as just, practical, and decidedly another author" (p. 1). By helping us under-
merciful - in short, why the term has such positive stand what may motivate Muslims, he might help us write
connotations in so many Muslim societies. such books on the choices that they actually make.
And indeed, this is where Hallaq parts from Sayyid
Qutb: For the latter, Muslims had to return to their very
origins in seventh-century Mecca and Medina in order to
find their way forward. He dealt with the centuries after
that period in a remarkably cavalier fashion. But Hallaq's
golden age was the developed form of the Islamic shari'a,
beginning some centuries after the first generation of

June 2014 | Vol. 12/No. 2 465

This content downloaded from 27.63.128.110 on Tue, 10 Sep 2019 07:43:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Review Symposium | The Impossible State

NEGUIN YAVARI Hallaq's readers would be remiss, however, to attribute

doi:1 0.1 01 7/S1 53759271 400098X
the failure of Islamist politics to the dearth of desirable
The central argument of Wael Hallaq's The Impossible
modern or humanist values, such as rule of law and respect
State is that "discursive negotiation" (p. 168) between
for basic human rights, including the right to dissent. All of
East and West would not only contribute to global those
peacehe argues, are found in tremendous abundance in
but also generate a new and authentic approach theto
true Sharfa, which was in effect before colonialism
disrupted organic social and political norms through
alleviating the ills of modernity. For the discursive
cultural penetration (p. 34). Rather, the culprits are the
negotiation - which must be protracted and procedural
deficiencies in the modern paradigmatic state and the
to succeed - each side will have to submit to a paradigm
shift: Muslims must forgo the goal of achieving an abnegation of morality that is germane to the type of
political community it fosters. In fact, the crisis of modern
Islamic state, because Islam, as moral order, is incompatible
with a political construct, and the West will have toIslam
agreeis no more than "the lack òf an auspicious moral
environment that can meet the minimal standards and
to a "reformation of [its] modern moralities" (p. 169).
expectations" of "Islamic governance" (p. 40). Muslims
Muslims will thus be rid of the crisis that has engulfed their
today suffer from "a certain measure of dissonance between
modern history, and the West will reinvest itself with ethical
their moral and cultural aspirations, and the moral realities
human agency.
of a modern world in which they must live, but had no part
An epistemological double helix is constructed to
forward the two concurrent claims. Both sides will in shaping" (p. 3). While the Enlightenment and the onset
have
of modernity heralded a new era in Western history, in
to first concede the paradigmatic definitions forwarded
the Islamic world they put a stop to dynamism and
by Hallaq - both of themselves and of the opposing
side - and then embrace a structural shift in these essen-change.
social
To set up his argument, Hallaq has had to render
tial paradigms. But synchronization between the two claims
the West and Islamic world comparable, an end that is
is achieved only at the expense of eschewing history, so
achieved only by reducing each to a paradigm, the state in
that the book engages in an abstract - as opposed to
the Western instance and the Sharfa in the Islamic one.
theoretical - argument. For a thesis designed to create
An important ancillary of the modern state-centered society
a working dialogue in the political present, this failure
is the primacy of the political, and that is why all attempts to
proves fatal.
graft the modern state apparatus in Shaif a-minded societies
The book's opening salvo rules out any past, present,
fail. In the West, we are told, "the relegation of the moral
or future for an Islamic state. According to Hallaq, such
imperative to a secondary status and its being largely
a state has never existed, and there is no likelihood of it ever
divorced from science, economics, law, and much else
existing in the future. The modern state, born in the has been at the core of the modern project" (p. 5), while
eighteenth century with the Enlightenment as its midwife, the "defining emblem" of the paradigm of Islamic gover-
is essentially and historically Western, and cannot be nance is the Shaifa, which "represented and is constituted
replicated outside of the West (p. 99). The validity of this by a moral law" and "always strove toward the realization of
thesis is assumed by a reference to the works of Carl this moral end, sometimes failing but most often succeed-
Schmitt (pp. 7-9, 12). Having thus defined the state as ing, which is precisely what made it a paradigm" (pp. 10-11,
singularly and essentially Western to his satisfaction, 96-97). As a moral order that eschews the political, Hallaq's
Hallaq moves on to claim that all modern experiments Sharfa cannot promote state formation. The Western
with an Islamic state are doomed to fail. Here he brings an paradigm, essentially political, defines its modern history,
example from history, the Islamic Republic of Iran, "where while the Islamic one, fundamentally moral, captures the
the state apparatus has subordinated and disfigured Sharfa true essence of Islam from its beginnings to the present.
norms of governance, leading to the failure of both Islamic The pitfall in Hallaq's paradigmatic scheme, however,
governance and the modern state as political projects" is that his Western paradigm is a historical process, whereas
(p. 2). To Islamists, Hallaq preaches that the political the paradigm on the Islamic side is a medieval relic, one
conundrum that engulfs modern Islamic history cannot be that had characterized Islamic society in earlier times and
resolved by mimicking the West, and this includes the effectively emasculates it in modern times. The wooly
commitment to a state-centered organization of adminis- premises Hallaq has conjured up to justify an abstract
tration and governance. As a political desideratum, the discussion of historical processes is exemplified in his
state is itself a colonial legacy and must be discarded. explanation for the rise of the Sharfa: "[T]he Community,
the common social world, organically produced its own
legal experts, persons who were qualified to fixlfill a variety
of legal functions that, in totality made up the Islamic legal
Neguin Yavari is Assistant Professor of History at The New system" (p. 52). Having made the Sharfa into an organic
School (YavariN@newschool.edu). growth in the medieval period, Hallaq is ready to declare it

466 Perspectives on Politics

This content downloaded from 27.63.128.110 on Tue, 10 Sep 2019 07:43:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
a fitting match against the Enlightenment (p. 13): The
Enlightenment, which came to be through the confluence
of economic, social, and political change, is pitted against
a Sharfa that has salient presence and enjoys "organic"
origins. The author is mindful of this fundamental
disequilibrium, though perhaps not of the severity of the
damage it inflicts on his thesis. In a curt, emphatic tone, he
claims, without offering either argument or evidence, that
Muslims live in the modern world and are therefore ipso
facto a part of modernity (p. xi).
By focusing on the paradigmatic, Hallaq hopes to
justify his decision to leave out history, and all non-
moral considerations, from his deliberations. To the
skeptic, he quickly asserts that his claim to the
supremacy of the Sharfa and the good governance that
it has supposedly secured for the Islamic world is not
undermined by historical infelicities, numerous as they
might be. The "paradigmatic status of the Sharfa," he
writes, is "of course" not to claim that when and where
in proper use, in the precolonial Islamic world, that is, "it
ensured an ideal life" (p. 11 and passim). The Sharfa
remained paradigmatic, "even if not all rulers complied with
its norms in the same way or to the same extent" (p. 64). But
dismal and complete failure in the translation of the ideal
into reality is the sole justification he provides for de-
claring, at the very outset, that he "will leave out of
consideration all modern Islamic experiments with the
Sharia" (p. 2 and passim). If deviations in the precolonial
period are ineffective in disturbing the Shaifa-induced moral
order, why are similar contemporary strayings powerful
enough to upset it? Hallaq is silent on this issue, as well he
should be, since not a single day of Islamic history could be
demonstrated as evidence for his thesis.
Hallaq' s condemnation of modern Islamism goes beyond
Islamist practice - as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, for
example - and also covers Islamist thought. Herein also is
the aporia at the fount of his method that undermines the
premises he has so painstakingly conjured up. In a particu-
larly cogent argument, perhaps the most powerful in the
book, he rejects the segregation of the "ritual" from the
"legal" in modern orientalist scholarship on Islamic law,
which fails to "appreciate both the legal ramifications of
'ibãdãt and the moral ramifications of those 'strictly legal'
provisions of muamalãt" { pp. 116, 149). As an exemplar of
the true Sharfa, Hallaq parades the famed eleventh-century
theologian al-Ghazzāll, who captured the paradigmatically
moral essence of the Sharfa in his "mystical Shar'ism."
Ghazzālī braided law and morality to reveal the full sig-
nificance of rituals of piety, or "the moral technologies of the
self," in Hallaq's borrowed nomenclature.
If Ghazzālī' s moral reading of the 4 ibãdãt is absent from
modern scholarship on the Sharfa, and that is taken as
This content downloaded from 27.63.128.110 on Tue, 10 Sep 2019 07:43:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
evidence of its decimation, it is so only in orientalist
(coterminous with "bad" in Hallaq's text) scholarship,
authored by Muslims and Westerners alike. A cursory
glance at modern Islamist scholarship is sufficient to reveal
the fallacy in Hallaq's emphatic dismissal of this important
corpus. In his interpretation of the etiquette of worship,
Kitab Sirr al-salãt (1982), Ayatollah Khomeini, jurist,
mystic, and theoretician of the Iranian revolution, refers to
the three principal postures of prayer (standing, bowing,
and prostrating) as emblematic of the three unities that
comprise tawhld - the unities of actions, divine attribute,
and divine essence, which reflect the incremental progress
of the supplicant on the mystical path. Is Khomeini's any
less of a bricolage? It defies logic to claim that the
paradigmatic Sharfa is not upheld in modern Islamist
thought.
Hallaq's discussion of the modern paradigmatic state,
by contrast, is a name-dropping spree. The author enlists
a motley troop of theorists, from Carl Schmitt to Thomas
Kuhn, John Gray, Michel Foucault, Leo Strauss, Charles
Larmore, and Charles Taylor. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas,
Descartes, Francis Bacon, Voltaire, Hobbes, Rousseau,
Hume, Spinoza, Hegel, Kant, Vico, Marx, Nietzsche,
Bentham, Mill, Kierkegaard, John Rawls, Antonio Gramsci,
and many more all make cameo appearances. Although
Hallaq cites these thinkers, he does not draw them into
a conversation. Rather, bits and pieces from each theorist are
strewn together to make possible his claim that reenchant-
ment is in order in the West, or that Ghazzālī (d. 1111)
anticipates Foucault. His exhortation to those Western
theorists dismayed with the ills of modernity, including
"poverty, social disintegration, and the deplorable destruction
of the very earth that nourishes humankind" (p. 5), is to look
for a moral and egalitarian organization of human society in
the true Sharfa, which, according to him, resonates with the
"slim yet resounding voices of the Mclntyres, Taylors, and
(even liberal) Larmores" (p. 169).
The double helix undergirding The Impossible State
conflates the abstract with the theoretical, and therein lies
the aporia. The paradigm of the state either is a product of
Western history or enjoys a ubiquitous presence over and
above it. Likewise, the Sharfa is either that which is upheld
by Muslims - how to collate the ethical universe of all
Muslims, or even the paradigmatic Muslim left with
a question mark - and expounded in scholarship on Islam
or it exists in spite of them. To pretend that the paradigms
of state and Sharfa were born, however abstrusely, in a
moment outside history - even if as ideals - but deter-
mined the very course of that history, and that in another
phoenix-inspired moment, they may be coaxed to self-
destruct, is to forgo much of the rational, epistemological
foundations of modern thought.
June 2014 | Vol. 12/No. 2 467