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In this book, Omer Awass examines the formation, history, and transformation of the Islamic legal discourse and institutions through the lens of a particular legal practice: the issuance of fatwas (legal opinions). Tracing the growth of Islamic law over a vast geographical expanse -from Andalusia to India - and a long temporal span - from the 7th to the 21st century, he conceptualizes fatwas as the 'atomic units' of Islamic law. Awass argues that they have been a crucial element in the establishment of an Islamic legal tradition. He also provides numerous case studies that touch on economic, social, political, and religious topics. Written in an accessible style, this volume is the first to offer a comprehensive investigation of fatwas within such a broad spatio-temporal scope. It demonstrates how instrumental fatwas have been to the formation of Islamic legal traditions and institutions, as well as their unique forms of reasoning.

This article explores the tensions of Islamic governance in contemporary Iran by examining the convergence of Islamic law with modern practices of governance. One key contention with contemporary statehood this political project is trying to reconcile is how to re-embed religious norms in the secularized political sphere. I assert that the political and legal practices for re-embedding these norms indicate an epistemic shift in the modes of legitimation within Muslim political and legal tradition possibly leading to the formation of a new Islamic political orthodoxy. This exploration is based on information from ethnographic interviews conducted with the former President of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1989–1997), the late Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and former Minister of Radio and Television (1981–1994) and the current member of the Expediency Council, Muhammad Rafsanjani. The article bases its argument by analyzing two variant forms of political practice. First, scrutinizing the fatwas of Ayatollah Khomeini that played a crucial role in influencing policy in the first decade of the Islamic Republic. Second, examining the adjudications of a conciliar governmental body (Majma-e Tashkhis-e Maslahat) formed a decade after the revolution to resolve the tensions associated with the implementation of Islamic law in this modern nation-state.

This paper theorizes the role of iftāʾ, the process of producing fatwas (Islamic legal opinions), on the formation of Muslim societies. I argue in this paper that iftāʾ is an ethical embedding mechanism that historically carried out this function through a set of discursive and nondiscursive relations. “Ethical embedding” signifies the situating of the various spheres of the social world into an ethical domain. As for iftāʾs discursive relations, the historical manifestations of its procedures and the production of fatwas represented a discursive formation because they manifested a particular regularity in their discursive operations. As for their nondiscursive relations, fatwas position actions and practices within the Islamic moral field through a definite social process. Finally, these operations generate a social field of power that structures the relations between the individuals and institutions of iftāʾ and induces personal dispositions that facilitate the practice of the norms embedded in the fatwa.

Fatwa, a legal response by a jurist-consult to concerns raised by the Muslim public, is the “atomic” component of Sharia. Substantive and formal aspects of Islamic law developed historically out of the corpus of fatwas, so they tell a lot about the anatomy of Sharia. This chapter will examine the contemporary fatwas issued by the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, an organization consisting of scholars from across the Muslim world. The fatwas examined here deal with economic issues that have arisen because of Sharia’s encounter with modernity. From these fatwas we can map the reproduction of Sharia in the postcolonial era and, at the same time, measure how Muslims are responding to modern and postmodern challenges.