Islamic divine-command ethics produced rule of law without exception

Evidence

Whereas mainstream Muslim intellectuals have moved from skepticism, as a distinctly epistemological impasse, to the absolute necessity of theism, the paradigmatic line of modern thinking moved from theism to the unavoidability of skepticism. In yet other words, a divine-command ethics, whose theoretical and substantive principles are elaborated—as I have been arguing throughout—by spatially and temporally dispersed communities of scholars, was the surest way to install a system of rule of law that was not subject to any individual or state agency. Here, the very concept of miracle that genealogically formed the basis of the Schmittian state of exception was turned on its head to generate a rule of law without exception. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 514

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Schmitt’s state of exception discourse (Agamben/state of exception literature) and to the broader rule-of-law debate.