Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Wael Hallaq , The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament (New York : Columbia University Press , 2012). Pp. 272. $37.50 cloth.
Islam and Modernity
In The Impossible State, Wael Hallaq argues that the modern state is a bad fit for Muslims. This is so because the paradigm of "Islamic Governance," developed through centuries of Islamic rule, and the modern state of the West, are incompatible, if not altogether contradictory. The modern state as sovereign, a European invention and an expression of the unique unfolding of Europe's history, is characterized by: an always-faltering separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judiciary branches; a separation between the "is" and the "ought to be"; and the primacy of the political over everything else (not to mention the state's penetration of its population à la Foucault)--all of which goes against the very grain of the Islamic nonstate. The latter, by contrast in Hallaq's view, is organized organically around God's sovereignty, with shari(a as the moral code, or the privileged expression of His Will. The translation of shari(a into law unfolds through the work of a learned juristic class that mediates between the community, to which the jurists are organically connected, and God the sovereign. The world of Islam is moral through a sort of excellence that rejects the separation between fact and norm. Its "political" realm is confined to executive rulers of rotating dynasties who remain external to the embryonic tight embrace between jurists and community, and whose role is to tax, organize armies, and regulate on the margins. In this universe, the organizing principle of life is the individual Muslim's "care of the self," which involves fashioning oneself as moral according to the dictates of the shari(a. This care of self is in contradistinction to the pitiable plight of the modern Western citizen whose subjectivity is fashioned by the state for its own selfish utilitarian ends. Pulling a Huntington-in-reverse, Hallaq argues not only that the modern state, which was thrust by Europe onto Muslim shores, is a bad fit for Muslims, but also that it is decidedly inferior to the counter model of Islamic governance. After all, Muslims, due to their "paradigm" of governance, had lived in peace...