The Life of Shari'a

Is there a way to think about contemporary life with knowledge that is neither modern nor Western? Rather than confining Islam to a "religion" and shariʿa to its "law," Youssef Belal provocatively argues that Islamic shariʿa is instead a mode of knowledge with its own concepts and scholarly categories through which the world and the self are grasped. Making this case requires two major intertwined genealogies: that of how Islamic scholars formulated knowledge from the classical period to today and that of how Westerners have understood the law and how it came to be constituted. By melding these two traditions and disentangling the ways they inflect and distort our understanding of each other, Belal puts the formation of modern law and its circulation outside Europe under a new light. He offers both a compelling revisionist account of shariʿa in the history of Islam and a powerful argument for its continued relevance to the life of contemporary Muslims.
 

Youssef Belal is an anthropologist and political theorist. He is also a UN diplomat and peace mediator who served as political director of UN missions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, and was named a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in 2016. He is author of Le cheikh et le calife: Sociologie religieuse de l’Islam politique au Maroc (The sheikh and the caliph: Religious sociology of political Islam in Morocco).