Schacht’s verdict of Shari’a stagnation described colonialism’s damage, not Islamic law’s nature.

Evidence

When Joseph Schacht, the “father” of Islamic legal studies in the West, sealed the fate of the Shariʿa as stagnant and as having lost touch with “state and society” since the ninth century, he was, in the 1950s and 1960s, describing a fait accompli, a colonialist process that had already eviscerated Shariʿa’s system during the century before his writings became canonical. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 752

Categorization

• XREF: A textbook case of a Western scholar mistaking the effects of colonial destruction for intrinsic cultural features — parallel to how Milgrom-style analysis can itself be an instrument of hegemonic framing.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the fait accompli argument’ in Oriental studies — how canonical ‘scientific’ verdicts were actually descriptive of processes the scholars’ own side had just carried out.