Late twentieth-century revisionist scholars independently reached Guénon’s view of Shariʿa change

Evidence

Guénon’s understanding of Islam and its Shariʿa (as integral to his “East”) in terms of fixity, immutability, and change is governing, and has an unmatched potency. Legal Orientalism dismissed even the very grounds on which such an understanding could be reached, and it took until the end of the twentieth century for scholars critical of this tradition to rehabilitate, against the Orientalist narrative, the concept of change in the Shariʿa. As it turned out, this revisionist scholarship, mindful of Orientalism as a colonialist discourse aiming at justifying, if not charting, the reengineering of Islam through its Shariʿa, reached the same understanding that Guénon had offered, an understanding that came without the complex details that writing legal history demands. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 309

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to contemporary Shariʿa historiography debates and whether legal-historical detail is actually necessary to reach the right conclusion about change.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the fact that an esoteric thinker and legal historians reach the same conclusion without shared detail suggest the Orientalist framing was purely ideological — and does lacking ‘complex details’ matter?