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A Discussion of Wael Hallaq's Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament

The central argument of Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible State is that “discursive negotiation” (p. 168) between East andWest would not only contribute to global peace but also generate a new and authentic approach to alleviating the ills of modernity. For the discursive negotiation—which must be protracted and procedural to succeed—each side will have to submit to a paradigm shift: Muslims must forgo the goal of achieving an Islamic state, because Islam, as moral order, is incompatible with a political construct, and the West will have to agree to a “reformation of [its] modern moralities” (p. 169). Muslims will thus be rid of the crisis that has engulfed their modern history, and theWest will reinvest itself with ethical human agency. An epistemological double helix is constructed to forward the two concurrent claims. Both sides will have to first concede the paradigmatic definitions forwarded by Hallaq—both of themselves and of the opposing side—and then embrace a structural shift in these essential paradigms. But synchronization between the two claims is achieved only at the expense of eschewing history, so that the book engages in an abstract—as opposed to theoretical—argument. For a thesis designed to create a working dialogue in the political present, this failure proves fatal. The book’s opening salvo rules out any past, present, or future for an Islamic state. According to Hallaq, such a state has never existed, and there is no likelihood of it ever existing in the future. The modern state, born in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment as its midwife, is essentially and historically Western, and cannot be replicated outside of the West (p. 99). The validity of this thesis is assumed by a reference to the works of Carl Schmitt (pp. 7–9, 12). Having thus defined the state as singularly and essentially Western to his satisfaction, Hallaq moves on to claim that all modern experiments with an Islamic state are doomed to fail. Here he brings an example from history, the Islamic Republic of Iran, “where the state apparatus has subordinated and disfigured Sharı‘a norms of governance, leading to the failure of both Islamic governance and the modern state as political projects” (p. 2). To Islamists, Hallaq preaches that the political conundrum that engulfs modern Islamic history cannot be resolved by mimicking the West, and this includes the commitment to a state-centered organization of administration and governance. As a political desideratum, the state is itself a colonial legacy and must be discarded. Hallaq’s readers would be remiss, however, to attribute the failure of Islamist politics to the dearth of desirable modern or humanist values, such as rule of law and respect for basic human rights, including the right to dissent. All of those he argues, are found in tremendous abundance in the true Sharı‘a, which was in effect before colonialism disrupted organic social and political norms through cultural penetration (p. 34). Rather, the culprits are the deficiencies in the modern paradigmatic state and the abnegation of morality that is germane to the type of political community it fosters. In fact, the crisis of modern Islam is no more than “the lack of an auspicious moral environment that can meet the minimal standards and expectations” of “Islamic governance” (p. 40). Muslims today suffer from “a certain measure of dissonance between their moral and cultural aspirations, and the moral realities of a modern world in which they must live, but had no part in shaping” (p. 3). While the Enlightenment and the onset of modernity heralded a new era in Western history, in the Islamic world they put a stop to dynamism and social change. To set up his argument, Hallaq has had to render the West and Islamic world comparable, an end that is achieved only by reducing each to a paradigm, the state in the Western instance and the Sharı‘a in the Islamic one. An important ancillary of the modern state-centered society is the primacy of the political, and that is why all attempts to graft the modern state apparatus in Sharı‘a-minded societies fail. In the West, we are told, “the relegation of the moral imperative to a secondary status and its being largely divorced from science, economics, law, and much else has been at the core of the modern project” (p. 5), while the “defining emblem” of the paradigm of Islamic governance is the Sharı‘a, which “represented and is constituted by a moral law” and “always strove toward the realization of this moral end, sometimes failing but most often succeeding, which is precisely whatmade it a paradigm” (pp. 10–11, 96–97). As a moral order that eschews the political, Hallaq’s Sharı‘a cannot promote state formation. The Western paradigm, essentially political, defines its modern history, while the Islamic one, fundamentally moral, captures the true essence of Islam from its beginnings to the present. The pitfall in Hallaq’s paradigmatic scheme, however, is that hisWestern paradigm is a historical process, whereas the paradigm on the Islamic side is a medieval relic, one that had characterized Islamic society in earlier times and effectively emasculates it in modern times. The wooly premises Hallaq has conjured up to justify an abstract discussion of historical processes is exemplified in his explanation for the rise of the Sharı‘a: “[T]he Community, the common social world, organically produced its own legal experts, persons who were qualified to fulfill a variety of legal functions that, in totality made up the Islamic legal system” (p. 52). Having made the Sharı‘a into an organic growth in the medieval period, Hallaq is ready to declare it Neguin Yavari is Assistant Professor of History at The New School (YavariN@newschool.edu).