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According to Yusuf al-Qaradawi – a prominent Muslim jurist of the contemporary period, the jurisprudence of priorities is intended to mitigate excess and negligence in legal reasoning. This article examines the fundamental principles of the jurisprudence of priorities as propounded by Yusuf al-Qaradawi in relation to the foundational sources of Islamic law. The purpose of this article is to dissect the constituent legal principles of the jurisprudence of priorities and critically evaluate their validity and coherence against the textual and rational evidences of Islamic law. This article argues that the fundamental principles of the jurisprudence of priorities are validated in the sources of Islamic law, and do facilitate the mitigation of excess and negligence in legal reasoning.

To say that the issue of Islamic legal reform is on the minds of most scholars and students (Muslim or otherwise) of Islamic law is hardly an exaggeration. But what does reform look like? Rumee Ahmed engages the issue in his recent book, Sharia Compliant: A User's Guide to Hacking Islamic Law. Intended for a broad audience and aimed at catalyzing legal change from the bottom up, Sharia Compliant attempts to demystify Islamic jurisprudence and provide a blueprint for lawmaking, or "hacking" Islamic law, through reverse-engineering. In the process of his critique of Islamic law, Ahmed revises its history and method. This review argues that in lieu of reform, Ahmed argues for re-forming Islamic law. The hyphen is meant to indicate that Ahmed's proposal amounts to a transmutation of fiqh and uṣūl al-fiqh: Islamic law is not interpreted, but arbitrarily willed; its sources (the Qur'an and Sunna), ornaments of this will, are instrumentalized to serve any desired end. In the end, Ahmed's re-formed system undermines his hope for a democratic process of lawmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contentiously debated shari'a (Islamic law) across the world has acquired specific political connotations. In India, this is so not only because the overbearing presence of fixity of maslaki-taqlīdi shari'a produce inverted truth that petrifies the true meaning, but also due to the deep entanglement of the legal with extra-legal phenomenon such as communalism, producing palpable theoretical–practical tensions. Employing the concepts of normativity and conviviality, the essay examines the normativity of dominant maslaki-taqlīdi shari'a-based Muslim Personal Law. Such a law aims at producing a conforming Muslim legal subject. On the other hand, this shari'a is rendered a contested terrain critically contesting the authority of the legal monotheism of codified taqlīdi shari'a by everyday laity ijtihād that constitutes the field of conviviality. Such conviviality is characterized by the laity's everyday idea of justice and democracy marked by a deep sense of defiance propelled by adverse and undesirable conditions of existence in everyday locations, viz., the Social. Thus, the field of conviviality is marked by a movement from normative subject to ontological self, enabling women/subjects to exercise their subjectivity to decode the occultated and petrified meanings of taqlīdi shari'a convivially. This signifies a movement towards making the canonized shari'a/law as an everyday social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Beyond the esoteric deliberations of Islamic jurists and their exegesis of criminal and private law doctrines, Iranian law lives a life of its own. It is a life of routine practices of judges, court clerks, lawyers and clients, each of whom is striving to turn the law to their own advantage. It is also a life of contested legality, a relentless struggle over the right to determine the law in a juridical field which is infused with strife and hostility. These conflicts are reproduced daily as two competing conceptions of law, and their corresponding perceptions of legality clash in pursuit of justice. The Iranian judiciary’s concept of law, its reconstruction of Islamic jurisprudence and methods of dispensing justice, which on the surface are reminiscent of Max Weber’s “qādi-justice,” collide with the legal profession’s formal rational understanding thereof. However, Iranian judges are not Weberian qādis, and the legal profession is not a homogenous group of attorneys driven by a collective commitment to the rule of law. To understand their conflict, we need to explore the mundane workings of the legal system in the context of the transformation of Iranian society and the unresolved disputes over the direction of its modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a brief overview of the main Islamic doctrinal themes and religious rules. It examines the fundamental themes that define the essence of the Islamic faith (aqīdah) and, accordingly, religious sciences developed around them. It also analyzes the key aspects of Muslim ethos, managed mostly by what is called Sharī'a and which are incorporates in two main categories of norms and obligations: those which regard the cult (ibadāt) and those which establish the human condition within society (mu'āmalāt). Finally, the paper provides an overview of issue of religious authority in Islam, topic that generated countless doctrinal, ideological, political disputes inside the Muslim societies, until today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problematic addressed in this article is the challenge initiated by the Arab revolutions to reform the Arab political system in such a way as to facilitate the incorporation of ‘democracy’ at the core of its structure. Given the profound repercussions, this issue has become the most serious matter facing the forces of change in the Arab world today; meanwhile, it forms the most prominent challenge and the most difficult test confronting Islamists. The Islamist phenomenon is not an alien implant that descended upon us from another planet beyond the social context or manifestations of history. Thus it cannot but be an expression of political, cultural, and social needs and crises. Over the years this phenomenon has presented, through its discourse, an ideological logic that falls within the context of ‘advocacy’; however, today Islamists find themselves in office, and in a new context that requires them to produce a new type of discourse that pertains to the context of a ‘state’. Political participation ‘tames’ ideology and pushes political actors to rationalize their discourse in the face of daily political realities and the necessity of achievement. The logic of advocacy differs from that of the state: in the case of advocacy, ideology represents an enriching asset, whereas in the case of the state, it constitutes a heavy burden. This is one reason why so much discourse exists within religious jurisprudence related to interest or necessity or balancing outcomes. This article forms an epilogue to the series of articles on religion and the state published in previous issues of this journal. It adopts the methodologies of ‘discourse analysis’ and ‘case studies’ in an attempt to examine the arguments presented by Islamists under pressure from the opposition. It analyses the experiences, and the constraints, that inhibit the production of a ‘model’, and monitors the development of the discourse, its structure, and transformations between advocacy, revolution and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Muslims who insist on the seclusion of women or their exclusion from men's gatherings are now routinely dismissed as extremists. That is inaccurate. Many such Muslims follow only key works of fiqh (Muslim scholarly legacy), which modern academics designate as pristine, classical Islam. But this fact leaves important questions unanswered: Why the early Muslim precedents do not always reflect this classical Islam? Why do Arabic-speakers enthusiastically embrace contradictory perceptions of the Sunna on women, that is, the excellent examples set in their communities in Islam's early centuries? Cracked historical lenses have been the mainstay of such conflicting beliefs, not extremism or irrationality. This article focuses on the disparities between Muslim records and their dominant narratives in presentations of exemplary women. How a particular worldview carefully designed an outline of history that created two separate stores of Muslim memories--one operational and the other latent--reveals the power of such precedents. The article concludes that, despite strides in contemporary research, led by many women, their brilliant findings could remain irrelevant What matters is that the bolted door of the formal narrative opens to admit standards set by long dead and (in Muslim views) excellent women to its store of valid precedents with which the faithful deduce Shari'a rules/laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pursuit of mutual understanding has not infrequently led Muslims and Christians to define their religious traditions in stark doctrinal opposition one to the other. In this regard, the “religion of law” (Islam)/“religion of grace” (Christianity) dichotomy has a particularly venerable history. This article sets out to re-examine and deconstruct a couplet that would strike many as a platitude, first by giving an account of the Sunni tradition of law-generation, situated in the broad context of the many options represented by different Islamic sects, and then by revisiting the paradigmatic understanding of law in the Christian dispensation worked out by Aquinas. This exposition leads to the conclusion that any simple opposition is to be avoided at all costs, obfuscating, as it does, much more than it elucidates. Furthermore, Christianity emerges from our chosen perspective as, in some sense, more essentially a “religion of law” than Islam ever could be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001, Mohsen Kadivar (1959-), a Qom-trained Shi'ite mujtahid, began advocating what he has alternately termed 'spiritual Islam', 'goal-oriented Islam', and 'new-thinker Islam'. No longer just a critic of the 'rule of the jurisprudent' (wilāyat-i faqīh) doctrine, Kadivar started to set forth his version of postrevivalist Islam, a kind that characteristically highlights its spiritual aspects but is nonetheless self-consciously anchored within the framework of Islamic jurisprudence. In this article, I will first examine Kadivar's arguments about the fundamental conflict between the traditional exegesis of Islam and modern human rights norms, the inadequacy of traditional Islamic jurisprudence as a means to tackle the conflict, and his proposed approach to solving the problem. I will then critically discuss certain controversial aspects of the new exegesis that Kadivar has proposed-particularly, the issues surrounding the abrogation of accepted precepts of sharī'a and the newly introduced conception of the intrinsic rights of human beings-as well as its significance and cogency. These examinations will highlight the unique emphasis that Kadivar has put on jurisprudence as the means to come to terms with the challenges of modernity, in contrast with more explicitly hermeneutic approaches preferred by some of his peers within the emerging postrevivalist current in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Law & Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Societe (University of Toronto Press) is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, I am concerned with understanding the recent efforts to reform the laws governing marriage and inheritance, the code de la famille or the Family Code in Mali. Since the advent of multiparty elections in the 1990s, prominent members of the Malian government and civil servants, Malian women's rights activists, secular NGOs, and international and bilateral donors have made efforts to promote various social reforms, including the advancement of women's rights and the promotion of gender equality, particularly through changes in the Family Code. While some observers have attributed the lack of reform to the increased influence of “Islamists” and/or to religiously conservative Muslims, I draw on historical research and ethnography to propose an alternative reading of the lack of institutional law reform. As I argue, the gap between Malian civil law relating to the family and the lived experiences and social practices of many Malians, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, has become even more apparent in this era of political liberalization and promotion of global human rights discourses. This has helped to make such proposed social reforms as the promotion of women's rights and family law reform more contentious and the ultimate outcome even more uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]