Orientalist scholarship framed Islamic fiqh as religious ethics, not law.

Evidence

Johansen reminds us of the colonial context of orientalist studies of the shari¯‘a, and observes that Snouck Hurgronje, the first Western authority on the subject, regarded fiqh as an incoherent mixture of religion, ethics, and politics—not as a functioning law but as a theory of the ideal Muslim society that had practical significance only in matters relating to ritual devotions, family relations, and endowments. This view, says Johansen, has had a profound effect on Western students of Islam who have tended to see fiqh as a deontology—a system of religious and moral duties—rather than as a law in the rational sense. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1167

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how colonial knowledge production shaped Western (mis)understandings of non-Western legal systems; parallels the reader’s work on how ‘deontology’ labels distort what a tradition actually was.