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Review Symposium: The Impossible State
The central argument of Wael Hallaq's The Impossible State is that "discursive negotiation" (p. 168) between East and West 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 the West 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 Shari'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...