Plurality of legal opinions signals bottom-up law rather than state power

Evidence

Plurality of opinion not only answered the multiplicity of particular and special situations but also served the exigencies of legal change, which were accommodated through built-in dynamics in the structures of legal reasoning. Its plurality ran counter to the spirit of uniformity, since homogenization was largely absent from its agenda. And since its interest lay in the individual as a singular, rationally autonomous worshiper of God, there was no need for an abstract and universalizing language. Most importantly, however, it is the declaratory nature of the code as well as its uniformity of substance and legal effect that betrayed a will to power that emanated from the higher offices of the nation-state; by contrast, in the Shariʿa, such a will to power did not exist because law and the legal system worked from the bottom upward, from the individual and local community first, moving up to larger governing (“political”) mechanisms, which Shariʿa itself also largely regulated. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 266

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that the Shariʿa’s defining plurality of opinion was a deliberate feature tied to bottom-up legal authority, not a sign of disorder or primitiveness.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier work on how decentralized, reputation-based institutions (law merchant, diamond bourse) operate without state enforcement — legal order built from below rather than decreed from above.