Orientalist scholarship framed Islamic law as borrowed from prior Near Eastern cultures

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the broader literature on scholarly narratives of Islamic law’s origins.