Social Theory: Wael Hallaq

5th Dec 2022 by Simon Mabon

By Ali Seyedrazaghi, Teaching Fellow, Lancaster University. 

Wael Hallaq, a professor of ethics, law, and political thought at Columbia University, is considered one of the most important contemporary thinkers in the field of Islamic studies. His work began with the study of Islamic Shari'a and has developed with his research on the problematic epistemic ruptures generated by the onset of modernity. As the defining emblem of Islamic civilization, Shari’a is one of the most central - if not the most central - phenomena that has played a prominent role in the formation and development of the Islamic episteme and the production of an Islamic version of the moral subject for more than a thousand years. 

Intellectual Context

The centrality of Shari'a allows Hallaq to be engaged with a wide range of debates and controversy that exist in Islamic studies, and to gradually establish his place among the few influential people in this field. Emphasizing the hegemony of Islamic Shari’a in connection with the other two characteristics of this phenomenon will help us to better conceptualize Hallaq's intellectual project and the fundamental reasons that help him to be at the center of Islamic studies. First, Islamic Shari’a has played a prominent role in shaping, developing, and continuously regulating the material structures that have existed in Islamic civilization and in a vast geography from East Asia to the Balkans. The hegemony of Shari’a on structures such as government, economy and education helps Hallaq to conceptualize Shari’a beyond a discipline related to divine command and in interaction with the emergence, continuity, and decline of specific structures that had beenat the center of Islamic civilization. This gives Hallaq an authoritative position in Islamic studies and allows him to find the opportunity to engage with a wide range of intellectual debates and controversies that exist within this field. Hallaq also makes use of the relation between Shari’a and Islamic material structures in expanding his field of study to the history of collapse of Islamic episteme with the emergence of modernity. 

The second point is the hegemonic role of Islamic Shari’a in relation to other disciplines in the Islamic episteme. Shari’a as one of the hegemonic modes of reasoning in Islam and as a system of law that existed in the Islamic society was having various effects on other methods of reasoning and production of knowledge in Islamic civilization, i.e. different disciplines from Kalam and Adab to philosophy and so on. Therefore, all the disciplines in the Islamic society, which sought to build a moral person in different ways, were in one way or another developed in connection with the Shari’a. “The scholars, thinkers, and intellectuals, from East to West of Islamdom, those whom we call ulama, jurists, judges, professors, Sufi Shaykhs, Quran specialists, hadith experts, adab writers, linguists, historians, biographers, traveler-scholars, kalam-theologians, philosophers, astronomers, Tasawwuf philosophers, chemists, vision scientists, logicians, mathematicians, scholars of instruments (technology specialists), and a host of subsidiary others” would eventually engage somehow with Shari’a in order to produce knowledge on their field of studies. In my opinion, this hegemony of Shari’a over other disciplines is the second factor that should be taken into consideration in examining Hallaq's thought and the conceptualization of his project. The centrality of Shari’a as a discipline eventually places Hallaq at the center of an interdisciplinary interaction in Islamic studies.

The two mentioned factors can be a start for conceptualizing the framework of Hallaq'sintellectual project and at the same time explain the centrality of Hallaq's thought in Islamic studies. But it would be a mistake to limit the emergence of Hallaq only to the centrality of Shari’a and its effects on Islamic civilization. The number of people who have studied the Islamic Shari’a in the same situation inside and outside the Islamic societies - for example, in the Orientalist tradition - is countless, but at the same time, none of them except Hallaq have attempted to make this study meaningful in relation to a broader epistemic condition, by starting from the conceptualization of the Islamic Shari’a. On the contrary, many of them - such as orientalists who have been engaged with this tradition to help the development of colonialism, nationalists who attempted to reread the knowledge produced in the Islamic episteme to legitimize their nation-state-building project, reformists who regardless of the different nature of the Islamic project, have reread its body of knowledge with the concepts developed within the liberal tradition, and finally, the Islamists who, regardless of the modern hegemony, have been living with the illusion of the continuity of Islamic knowledge in the modern era - have started studying the body of Islamic knowledge from conceptual frameworks that have expanded outside the episteme or with questions that have emerged outside the structure of this episteme, and each of them has not only misrepresented this body in some way, but also caused the destruction of this episteme from within. Thus, what makes Hallaq different from this spectrum is the conscious commitment to use the conceptual structure of the Islamic episteme in rereading its different parts on the one hand, and the ambitious effort to conceptualize the overall structure of the Islamic project, starting from the relationship of Shari’a with other parts of this episteme and by applying concepts such as episteme, paradigm, and central domain in his intellectual journey on the other hand.

Key Arguments

With this background, we can now better follow Hallaq's intellectual journey during the last few decades. As mentioned, a large part of Hallaq's work has been related to Shari’aand explaining the theoretical relationship between Islamic ethics and Islamic law. Hallaqhas not only tried to conceptualize the Islamic project using the centrality of Shari’a but also gradually used this framework to explain the decline of Islamic episteme in relation to the clash with the modern. Hallaq's departure in this direction begins with his book calledThe Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament. This book should be considered the beginning of Hallaq's transition from studying Shari’a to the development of Hallaq's intellectual project starting with the field of political theory. In this book and in a comparative study between the Islamic and modern state, Hallaq seeks to show that there is a fundamental contradiction between the modern state and the Islamic project in constructing a moral human being, and for this reason, by any standard, what iscalled an Islamic state is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Therefore, Hallaq's conceptualization of the Islamic episteme and its central project against the modern episteme begins with the study and comparison of political, legal, ethical, and Islamic structures. It is in this framework that Hallaq focuses on what he calls the modern moral predicament by deeply differentiating between Islamic episteme and modern episteme and argues that the modern state structure cannot meet the needs of a Muslim individual due to the lack of its moral technology of self. Hallaq's argues that basically the Islamic currents that have come to power in countries like Iran or are seeking to come to power in other parts of the Islamic world are not aware of the genealogy of the modern state and its contradiction with the Islamic project of creating a moral subject and for this reason their project is doomed to failure. While this book is somewhat limited to a specific case study on the conflict between the structure of the Islamic state and the Islamic project, the role of this book in the context of the larger intellectual project of Hallaqshould be considered as a step to conceptualize the structure of the Islamic episteme, an explanation of the state of epistemic rapture, and finally criticism of modernity. All three of these stages organize the framework of Hallaq's intellectual project.

Hallaq's next book, which covers another part of his intellectual journey, is written in criticism of Said's Orientalism where he deepens the critique of Orientalism to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of modernity. Hallaq undertakes several related tasks at the same time in this project. The book begins with a critique of Said's orientalism and hismost central concept, misrepresentation. In the first stage, Hallaq argues that Saeed's criticism of Orientalism has ignored its epistemic foundations, and thus limiting Orientalism to misrepresentation and its relation to power is insufficient. Therefore, Hallaqargues that in order to understand the structure of Orientalism, beyond the issue of mis/representation, the real impact of this form of knowledge production in Islamic societies and ultimately its role in the collapse of the Islamic episteme should be in the center of attention. With this approach, Hallaq tries to answer why the language produced in Orientalism should be considered not only misrepresentative but also performative. Therefore, in the first part of his book, Hallaq deals with three specific tasks. First, he argues, Orientalism is an epistemic phenomenon, second, it cannot be reduced to misrepresentation, and finally, it should not be assumed that misrepresenting Islamic knowledge is limited to only one type of relationship between power and knowledge, namely Orientalism. The conceptualization of these three processes helps Hallaq to explain how the structure of the Islamic episteme should be studied outside of modern hegemony, and how the role of epistemic rapture should be taken into consideration in the contradictions that exist in the contemporary situation of Muslims.

Hallaq’s vigorous efforts does not end with his book, and he continues presenting that the conceptualization of Orientalism should take place at a deeper level of the relation of power and knowledge, so that Orientalism can be conceptualized as a discipline related to the project of modernity.  Refusing to isolate Orientalism, Hallaq suggests that Orientalism should be recognized and be criticised alongside with other modern disciplines from law, economics, and philosophy, to scientific inquiry with their involvement in colonialism, mass annihilation, and systematic destruction of the natural world. Thus, according to Hallaq, the problem is not only with Orientalism, but with the essence of the modern project and its concept of sovereignty which create a certain type of relation between power and knowledge. 

While Hallaq's effort before Restating Orientalism is focused on explaining the central project of Islamic episteme, identifying its structure, and protecting it by criticizing its re-reading from within modern episteme, Hallaq's next step to complete his project is focused on something that needs to be called reforming modernity. In his last work with the same title, Reforming Modernity, Hallaq tries to show that the criticism of modernity should be formed by relying on a moral theory. His last book, which should be read with having such a background in mind and understood within this line of thought, in the engagement with the philosophy of Taha Abdul Rahman deals with the simultaneous criticism of the modern project as well as the many efforts made in the past hundred years in various formats for the development of Islamic modernity. In this book he tries to demonstrate that the reform of modernity should be based on a specific moral system, and this is an attempt that exists in Taha's philosophy and Hallaq introduces it to the western reader.

In Application

Hallaq's intellectual work is useful in various fields of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies.While Hallaq has clearly been able to conceptualize Sharia as a central phenomenon in Islamic epistemology beyond the framework of Islamic jurisprudence, his main function for students of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies is his attempt to create a coherent understanding of Islamic project by focusing on both material and intellectual tradition of Islam. In this way, Hallaq's work helps anyone in Islamic studies to have a betterunderstanding of Islamic society, as well as the subject that the Islamic project seeks to create. Moreover, Hallaq helps us to understand the complexity of Muslim societies after the epistemic ruptures generated by the emergence of modernity. One also needs to be aware that Hallaq’s work is not only pathological but he also plants seeds in the minds of people engaged with his intellectual journey, in order to start finding solutions for the problems of the Islamic societies, and to use the Islamic intellectual tradition to engage with the modern crises of the world.

Select Bibliography

Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)

Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018)

The Impossible State: Islam, Politics and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013)

An Introduction to Islamic Law (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Shari'a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

he Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Authority, Continuity, and Change in Islamic law (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni Usul al-Fiqh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)