Orientalist studies of Islam’s legal origins covertly justify Westernizing Shariʿa

Evidence

An important and thickly constructed narrative is the entire Orientalist subfield that “investigates” the origins of Islam, essentially showing that the “heavy debt” Islam owed to previous legal cultures and “civilizations” (Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Jewish, even Persian) is commensurate with modern Islam’s legal deficiency (namely, deficiency of the Shariʿa), which can be cured only by accepting and adopting the legal systems of the inheritors of these ancient civilizations, who happened to be represented by the modern Europeans. It is not readily detectible to the uncritical eye that a subfield which pretends to study legal history and so-called legal transplantation in the sixth and seventh centuries AD is driven by an ideology that is directly—though surreptitiously—connected with an ideological system constructed to justify the Westernization of Islam’s legal system and consequently Islam itself. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 779

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘scientific’ subfields can embed a prescriptive policy agenda while claiming neutral historiography — the ‘origins of Islam’ scholarship as a case study in disguised teleology.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a whole ‘impartial’ academic subfield is surreptitiously programmatic — that scholarly conclusions about 6th-7th century legal history are wired to a modern Westernization prescription — is a dense, paradigm-shifting move about how to read an entire knowledge domain.