Normative pluralism in Islamic law rests on distinguishing divine from fallible human knowledge

Evidence

An illustrative instance may provide some clarification. Take, for example, a fairly large body of Orientalist discourse that has been geared, for nearly three-quarters of a century, to the study of the Quran, the Islamic foundationalist text par excellence, in the formative period of so-called Islamic law. This early historical phase has been dominated by a narrative of “borrowings” and “debts” to the preceding cultures of the Near East, most notably the Greco-Roman, Byzantine, and Jewish. “Islamic law,” also misnamed “Mohammadan law,” is said to have accumulated such a debt by a wholesale incorporation, under an Islamic “veneer,” of the former cultures’ institutions and legal concepts, since the overriding but often undeclared racial assumption is that the impoverished tribes of the desert-filled Arabia who conquered the entire belt stretching from Morocco to Transoxiana could not have built an empire with such sophistication on their own. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 510 (#complicates, via linked claim)

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Medieval pluralism meant separate religious legal systems, not religious equality; Shariʿa’s pluralism of opinion enabled legal change and regional flexibility; Islamic law remained flexible through custom, public interest, and necessity. (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Orientalist scholarship framed Islamic law as borrowed from prior Near Eastern cultures #complicates (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 510
• Islamic divine-command ethics produced rule of law without exception #complicates (0.74) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 514