The claim that Islamic law stagnated is an orientalist projection, not history.

Evidence

In fact, recent scholarship on the history of the shari¯‘a (by, for example, Wael Hallaq, Haim Gerber, and Baber Johansen38) has challenged the orientalist thesis, propounded in the West since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, that the Islamic legal tradition became static—that “the gates of ijtiha¯d were closed,” as the famous phrase has it—after the first formative centuries. That thesis reflects the more general notion that “the traditional” is opposed to “the modern” as the unthinking and unchanging is to the reasoned and new. But argued change was always important to the shari¯‘a, and its flexibility was retained through such technical devices as ‘urf (custom), maslaha (public interest), and daru¯ra (necessity). — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1059

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘traditional vs modern = unthinking vs reasoned’ dichotomy is exactly the binary Asad says secular modernity imposes selectively — same mechanism the reader’s im/modesty article shows applied to dress. — connects to: The claim of Islamic scientific decline is a Eurocentric projection, not history — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 352
• SEED: A ‘who polices the gates?’ angle: the metaphor of closing gates of interpretation used to deny internal change to Islam while the same interpreters celebrate Protestant and Catholic internal revolutions as modernization.