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Review Symposium
In his new book The Impossible State : Islámy Politics , and Modernity's Moral Predicament , Wael B. Hallaq argues that
"The Islamic State/ judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both an impossibility and
a contradiction in terms/' In developing this argument Hallaq draws upon his extensive body of work as a scholar of Islam,
including most notably his Sharia: Theory, Practice , Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2009). At the same
time, Hallaq contributes to debates in political theory about the nature of the modern state. As part of our new
"Undisciplined'' format, this symposium seeks to bring a range of disciplinary perspectives into a discussion of this timely
and important argument. We have invited a number of scholars from different intellectual backgrounds to share their
views on the book as a contribution to the understanding of modern Islam, and also to reflect on how this work adds to our
understanding of the relationship between religion and politics.
©American Political Science Association 2014 June 2014 | Vol. 12/No. 2 461
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Review Symposium | The Impossible State
contemporary global and capitalist order itself is inimical pre-modern Muslim societies (pp. 52-58). Rather than
to the establishment and maintenance of a viable Islamic
simply marking divergences between paradigms, the key
state.
concepts Hallaq raises as points of comparison - separation
The violent historical encounter between the modern
of powers, sovereignty, authority, subjectivity - each also
state project and Islamic governance provides themark
central
critical lines of tension between paradigm and history.
Perhaps the more pressing analytic question might
drama of Hallaq's argument, but the book's characteriza-
tion of this encounter also raises some problematictherefore
issues. be how the internal resources of Islamic
The author theorizes the encounter between Muslims and
governance function to ameliorate these tensions, and
here a sense of Muslim engagements with the dissonance
the modern state in terms that locate agency unequivocally
in the hands of the modern West: "Modernity,between
whose their experience and aspirations, in diverse times
hegemonic discourse is determined by the institutions and might have provided further clarity.
and places,
intellectuals of the powerful modern West, has not offered
This reading of the relationship between paradigm and
a fair shake to two-thirds of the world's population
history could also work to strengthen what may be the
book's seminal contribution to both Islamic and Western
who have lost their history and, with it, their organic
ways of existence" (pp. 3-4). Contemporary Muslims
legal and political theory: its vision of how law might be
face a "dissonance between their moral and cultural theorized beyond modernity and the nation state. Hallaq
aspirations . . . and the moral realities of the modernputs forward a vision of law embedded in an episteme,
world . . . realities with which they must live but that a cosmology, and a praxis. In the modern project, law is the
were not of their own making" (p. 3). expression of sovereign will, and this sovereignty is
Hallaq's commitment to moral resources as a paththeorized as popular sovereignty but exercised by a godlike
forward would seem to have less potential if modernity is state, without which the law is unimaginable and
hegemonic and agency has been denied to Muslims. unintelligible (pp. 29-34). The development of modern
Fortunately, it is unclear whether the Muslim commitment legality in conjunction with the state has further
to the modern nation state is now, or has ever been, as exacerbated the disengagement of law from morality
whole-hearted as Hallaq assumes (p. 75). The acceptance ofand society (p. 83). He argues that the unity between
the state model in modern Islamic political and legal the modern state and law "does not meet the standards
thought might be read more often than not as a vehicle of Islamic governance" (p. 38); "in the shari'a, the legal is
for Muslim political aspirations, and the relationshipthe instrument of the moral, not the other way around"
between Muslims and the modern state as one of continual(p. 10). When the moral is taken as the "central domain"
struggle rather than hegemony. The dissonance that Hallaq(p. 7), a renewed understanding of law and its potential
finds between Muslim aspirations and modern realities hasemerges, law as integral to the project of moral gover-
functioned as a point of departure for a wide range of nance, "attentive to the spiritual-moral self, to family and
modern Islamic thought and Muslim politics, but such iscommunity, to economic equitability, and ... to the
the force of modernity for Hallaq, that the contrast can onlyenvironment" (p. 198, n. 99).
properly be made between premodern Islam and the In the paradigm of Islamic governance, the paramount
modern state. activity is striving (literally, "jihad"; p. 11) towards the
Some critiques of Hallaq's recent work revolve around moral, a "foundational and structural impulse. .. [to]
his tendency to contrast Islam and the shari'a in their idealdiscover God's moral will." From this, the legal method-
formulations with the historical experience of the modernology of ijtihad follows, a process that yields law that is
state. Hallaq argues that the purpose of focusing on the "inherendy multiple and probabilistic" (p. 58), a rule of
"paradigm" of Islamic governance is not to deny itslaw to which all actors in the state are subservient. This
workings in the world, but to seek to understand how vision of "highly meaningful rule of law" (p. 74), a worked
"paradigmatic discourses and practices . . . [persisted] in in combination with legal actors and institutions embed-
the continual re-creation of a particular order" (p. 11). Atded in local civil society, and depended upon willing
times, the distinction between legal theory and historical individual submission to the law, cultivated by performa-
experience remains unclear - as in the discussion oftive and affective aas (p. 118). When contrasted with that
separation of powers in the modern state (pp. 38-48), of the modern state, Hallaq argues, "Islamic governance
when the target of Hallaq's critique is the Euro-American emerges ... as a distincdy more favorable expression of just
state, the United States, and/or the nation-state, its legal and democratic rule" (p. 74).
theory, its institutional makeup, and/or its empirical The book makes a further contribution to religion and
failings. This slippage makes it hard to evaluate thepolitics scholarship by historicizing the commonly made
comparative bases of some of Hallaq's claims about Islamic distinction between the ritual and ethico-legal elements of
governance, adjudication and society, particularly when it is Islam. Hallaq makes the key point that categorical divisions
likewise unclear when Hallaq refers to the theoretical logicbetween ibadat ("religious works"; p. 216) and muamalat
of Islamic institutions, and when to their workings in ["laws and transactions . . . between people"; p. 217)
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reinscribe a false (Enlightenment) dichotomy between the
ritual and the legal elements of the shari'a. This false
dichotomy has fueled an understanding of the shari'a as
a system lacking in efficacy and incapable of enforcement -
and therefore in need of colonial and national state inter-
ventions. Scholarship on "Islamic law," a category that
itself derived from assumptions about the divisibility of
law from other domains of life and governance, often
replicates these assumptions (p. 113). The sections that
elaborate the relationship between ibadat and mu'amalat
as mutually constitutive components in the shari'a
system have a grace and coherence that themselves go
much of the way to communicating - stylistically and
substantively - the gap between modern state law and
the moral law of the shari'a, not just as varieties of legal
logic, but as ways of being in the world (pp. 1 18-135).
Here, Hallaq makes a tantalizing case for understanding
the shari'a as a "field of practical mysticism" (p. 137),
making Islamic governance not merely a system of law
and morality, but a unified worldview and pragmatic
field "that did not distinguish . . . between the meanings of
the legal, the moral and the mystical" (p. 138).
The Impossible State makes an important theoretical
contribution to both Islamic legal studies and contemporary
critiques of the modern project. For scholars of religion,
politics and law, Hallaq presents a challenge to think about
law not merely as an outcome of politics, but as critically
constitutive and generative of political thought, institu-
tions and repertoires. At a time when the futures of many
Muslim states are in flux, this work makes a provocative
case for the depth and potential of "Islamic moral
resources" (p. 13) to show the way forward, even as it
argues that "[f]or Muslims today to seek the adoption of
the modern state system ... is to bargain for a deal
inferior to the one they secured for themselves over the
centuries of their history" (p. 72).
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Review Symposium | The Impossible State
NATHAN J. BROWN His paradigms are not timeless, however; they are socially
doi:1 0.1 01 7/S1 53759271 4000978
and historically created. And they can die.
In this book, Wael Hallaq at first seems to take aim Inat short, Hallaq is concerned with the essence of the
modern state, on the one hand, and the Islamic shari'a,
Islamist political movements with his claim that "any
on the other, after all of their accidental variations,
conception of a modern Islamic state is inherently self-
accretions, and distorted applications are stripped away.
contradictory' (p. ix; emphasis in the original). And indeed,
How does the author decide what is paradigmatic
Hallaq does dismiss much of the Islamist project, which he
in modernity, the West, and the state? What are the
sees as Islamizing society through the state. His book misses
the mark a bit in that effort. But that is largely because"fondamental
his structures or properties that the state has in
true targets are far broader: modernity, the West, andreality
the possessed for at least a century and without which it
state - terms that he sees as inextricably linked. could never be conceived of as a state, being that essential "
(p. 21; emphasis original)? Hallaq turns to many critics of
The Impossible State is an audacious book. It is also
erudite in its engagement with various bodies of writingmodernity and the state, but perhaps no voice speaks
louder than that of Carl Schmitt. The modern state "exists
and entire disciplines. Should it be interesting to political
for its own sake"; it is "a means to no other end" with its
scientists? I think so, but only in a much more modest way
than the author intends. own supremacy "the highest value, which the citizen must
always privilege." Possessing absolute sovereignty, the
Hallaq's critique of modernity rests on an essentialism
so sweeping that most students of politics will find modern
it state is predicated on the "sacrifice of the citizen"
because
unhelpful. But in the process of arguing from essences, he the state is more precious than life (p. 28).
Demonstrating his historical understanding, Hallaq dis-
gives a sympathetic view of the Islamic shari'a that will
misses anything he deems "utopian or futuristic," instead
help many appreciate how it has been understood, pursued,
focusing on "the real, existing, and paradigmatic state"
and practiced - and why it continues to have appeal even
in the midst of a modern state system. In that way,(p. he 21), suggesting that actual injustices committed by
modern
(unintentionally) provides an extremely brief and limited but states are part of their essence and not accidental.
useful way to understand the Islamist resurgence. And indeed, the modern state, with its "exclusively
European" (p. 3) genealogy, is capable of an enormous
Let us begin with Hallaq's essentialism. He does use the
amount of killing, domination, and destruction.
word "essence" on occasion, but he prefers "paradigmatic"
instead: "In our account of paradigm, what is involved isWhen
a he turns to the Islamic shari'a, Hallaq seems to
subtly (and only implicitly) shift his method; rather than
system of knowledge and practice whose constituent domains
share in common a particular structure of concepts that qual-
examine actions, he stresses institutions and discourses.
itatively distinguish them from other systems of the same There is an element of modernization theory in reverse
here;
species" (p. 8). There, are of course, discordant, irregular, or not only is the Islamic shari'a essentially different,
abnormal elements within any domain, but they subvert the it is also better than modernity in its provision of
but
paradigm and are not part of it - and if they ever become justice, protection of the weak, and insistence on holding
dominant, then they form the basis for a new paradigm.those in power accountable to moral standards that they
Historical departures from the paradigm do not touch themselves cannot set. It was not necessarily unique in this
respect: "Premodern societies - i.e., prestate social forma-
its essence; for the Islamic shari'a, for instance: "The mess
of social reality - the victimized child, the robbed trader, and outside of Europe . . . differed from one another
tions
the overtaxed peasant - could always rely on a hegemonic significandy, yet for all their dissimilarities, they still
moral system that did its best to address the reality. That differed
it considerably more from the discipline and order
was not always successful is a fact that we should take for of the modern state's social creation" (pp. 98-99).
granted - for perfect success is the lot of no society, past orYet again, Hallaq is not ahistorical; the Islamic shari'a
present - but the paradigmatic efficacy of the moral dis- was formed sociologically and historically. But paradoxi-
position cannot be questioned" (p. 11; emphasis original). cally, it was precisely because the Islamic shari'a promised
The reference to "reality" and "fact" at variance with to be good for all times and places that it was applied by
those who were guided by particular social needs and
paradigms should not mislead. Hallaq's paradigms
themselves are not mere names but are quite real overriding
for goals. Its primary concern "was the regulation,
on moral grounds, of social and economic relations" (p. 59).
him (he refers at one point to the " reality " of the "legal
culture" of a Muslim jurist (p. 73; emphasis original). Many other scholars have noted that when discourses,
institutions, and practices deriving from the Islamic
shari'a operate in the context of the modern state, they
do so in a very different manner; Hallaq has contributed to
Nathan J. Brown is Professor of Political Science and that realization in past works in some stark ways. But in
this book he goes farther. Not only does he declare the
International Affairs at The George Washington University
(nbrown@gtvu.edu). Islamic shari'a "institutionally defunct" (p. 13), and not
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only is it clear that the modern state is the murderer. Muslims and continuing up until the modern era. He is far
The modern state and the Islamic shan a are fundamentally more respectful of the tradition than Sayyid Qutb; indeed,
and absolutely incompatible because of the difference in it is there, and not in the original revelations, that he finds
their essences. There is an odd echo of Sayyid Qutb's claim , the Islamic shari'a's essence.
that all existing societies are jahili (operating in pre-Islamic In another sense, however, Hallaq is even more radical.
ignorance) because they involve domination of man by man Sayyid Qutb and his defenders insist that he was decrying
rather than rule in accordance with God's instructions existing societies as non-Islamic, but he was not interested
(though there are, as we shall see, two critical differences in questioning the status of individual Muslims. For
between Sayyid Qutb and Hallaq). Hallaq, however, the end of the Islamic shari'a has very
This is a radical claim; it is also one that most political dire consequences: " There is no Muslim identity without this
scientists will find unhelpful precisely because it is so ethic ' (p. 70; emphasis original).
extreme and essentialist. Hallaq is dismissive of anything That leaves Muslims in a difficult position indeed.
How are they to lead Muslim lives when the path devel-
that departs from his absolutes: The separation of powers
is chimerical; the rule of law and democracy "must be oped to do so has been permanently blocked? Hallaq does
called into question" (p. 47). Only globalization might not quite abandon them; while he does not think the
temper the modern state (he speculates on this issue but Islamic shari'a can be revived, in the book's final pages
issues no definitive judgment), but if it does, the resulting he suggests some signposts on the road to a recovery of
tension is likely to produce unstable results. parts of its virtues. In keeping with his claims, that road
Yes, if one draws one's understanding of the state from does not run through the modern state but around it.
fascism, one will be repulsed. And if one's understanding He suggests quite briefly that Muslims experiment with
of an Islamic society is as absolutist as Sayyid Qutb's, the new (and unspecified) forms of governance and that they
fundamental incompatibility is obvious. But what is "engage with their Western counterparts with respect to
gained by talking not of tensions, contradictions, hybridity, the necessity of positioning the moral as the central
appropriation, even mongrelization but instead of absolute domain" (p. 169).
incompatibility and impossibility? Of course there is The sudden intrusion of (admittedly guarded and
a tension between the modern state and the Islamic shari'a qualified) optimism suggests that Hallaq may have been
as it was historically practiced and understood. But so is too dismissive of Islamist movements, or indeed insuf-
there tension between some practices associated with some ficiently attentive to much of what modern Muslims say,
modern states and liberalism, republicanism, constitution- think, and do. It is true that some movements have focused
alism, Catholicism, and many other ideas and approaches on reforming the states that govern them along Islamic lines
that seem to operate (hardly unchanged) in the modern and that these efforts have brought different and fewer fruits
world. Few scholars would find such categorical thinking than their proponents expected. But Islamism is a far more
useful or interesting. varied phenomenon that can be used to describe a large
What many should find helpful is Hallaq's brief family of approaches designed to ensure that individual
portrayal of how the Islamic shari'a was understood and Muslims and the broader society can live in accordance with
practiced. Here he departs from the extremely general divinely sanctioned moral instructions. And there are a host
nature of his argument to delve into some details of the of other approaches that Muslims have developed in the
system he finds so admirable. The details themselves are of modern world in an effort to live by Islamic principles.
less interest - and most readers will not be able to assess his Some might be helped by particular state policies; others
claims - but the picture of the Islamic shari'a that emerges might be hindered. But those approaches are real, they are
from them gives us a far better understanding of how issues followed, and they have consequences.
that might seem to some eyes as quite distinct - such as Hallaq begins his book by posing the question "what
prayer and business transactions - can form part of a single type of political rule are Muslims presently adopting or
moral/legal discourse; how the Islamic shari'a can be likely to adopt in the future?" But he quickly describes this
understood as a total system rather than as a series of legal as "a separate field of enquiry for another book and
rules; and how it can be understood as just, practical, and decidedly another author" (p. 1). By helping us under-
merciful - in short, why the term has such positive stand what may motivate Muslims, he might help us write
connotations in so many Muslim societies. such books on the choices that they actually make.
And indeed, this is where Hallaq parts from Sayyid
Qutb: For the latter, Muslims had to return to their very
origins in seventh-century Mecca and Medina in order to
find their way forward. He dealt with the centuries after
that period in a remarkably cavalier fashion. But Hallaq's
golden age was the developed form of the Islamic shari'a,
beginning some centuries after the first generation of
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Review Symposium | The Impossible State
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a fitting match against the Enlightenment (p. 13): The evidence of its decimation, it is so only in orientalist
Enlightenment, which came to be through the confluence (coterminous with "bad" in Hallaq's text) scholarship,
of economic, social, and political change, is pitted against authored by Muslims and Westerners alike. A cursory
a Sharfa that has salient presence and enjoys "organic" glance at modern Islamist scholarship is sufficient to reveal
origins. The author is mindful of this fundamental the fallacy in Hallaq's emphatic dismissal of this important
disequilibrium, though perhaps not of the severity of the corpus. In his interpretation of the etiquette of worship,
damage it inflicts on his thesis. In a curt, emphatic tone, he Kitab Sirr al-salãt (1982), Ayatollah Khomeini, jurist,
claims, without offering either argument or evidence, that mystic, and theoretician of the Iranian revolution, refers to
Muslims live in the modern world and are therefore ipso the three principal postures of prayer (standing, bowing,
facto a part of modernity (p. xi). and prostrating) as emblematic of the three unities that
By focusing on the paradigmatic, Hallaq hopes to comprise tawhld - the unities of actions, divine attribute,
justify his decision to leave out history, and all non- and divine essence, which reflect the incremental progress
moral considerations, from his deliberations. To the of the supplicant on the mystical path. Is Khomeini's any
skeptic, he quickly asserts that his claim to the less of a bricolage? It defies logic to claim that the
supremacy of the Sharfa and the good governance that paradigmatic Sharfa is not upheld in modern Islamist
it has supposedly secured for the Islamic world is not thought.
undermined by historical infelicities, numerous as they Hallaq's discussion of the modern paradigmatic state,
might be. The "paradigmatic status of the Sharfa," he by contrast, is a name-dropping spree. The author enlists
writes, is "of course" not to claim that when and where a motley troop of theorists, from Carl Schmitt to Thomas
in proper use, in the precolonial Islamic world, that is, "it Kuhn, John Gray, Michel Foucault, Leo Strauss, Charles
ensured an ideal life" (p. 11 and passim). The Sharfa Larmore, and Charles Taylor. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas,
remained paradigmatic, "even if not all rulers complied with Descartes, Francis Bacon, Voltaire, Hobbes, Rousseau,
its norms in the same way or to the same extent" (p. 64). But Hume, Spinoza, Hegel, Kant, Vico, Marx, Nietzsche,
dismal and complete failure in the translation of the ideal Bentham, Mill, Kierkegaard, John Rawls, Antonio Gramsci,
into reality is the sole justification he provides for de- and many more all make cameo appearances. Although
claring, at the very outset, that he "will leave out of Hallaq cites these thinkers, he does not draw them into
consideration all modern Islamic experiments with the a conversation. Rather, bits and pieces from each theorist are
Sharia" (p. 2 and passim). If deviations in the precolonial strewn together to make possible his claim that reenchant-
period are ineffective in disturbing the Shaifa-induced moral ment is in order in the West, or that Ghazzālī (d. 1111)
order, why are similar contemporary strayings powerful anticipates Foucault. His exhortation to those Western
enough to upset it? Hallaq is silent on this issue, as well he theorists dismayed with the ills of modernity, including
should be, since not a single day of Islamic history could be "poverty, social disintegration, and the deplorable destruction
demonstrated as evidence for his thesis. of the very earth that nourishes humankind" (p. 5), is to look
Hallaq' s condemnation of modern Islamism goes beyond for a moral and egalitarian organization of human society in
Islamist practice - as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, for the true Sharfa, which, according to him, resonates with the
example - and also covers Islamist thought. Herein also is "slim yet resounding voices of the Mclntyres, Taylors, and
the aporia at the fount of his method that undermines the (even liberal) Larmores" (p. 169).
premises he has so painstakingly conjured up. In a particu- The double helix undergirding The Impossible State
larly cogent argument, perhaps the most powerful in the conflates the abstract with the theoretical, and therein lies
book, he rejects the segregation of the "ritual" from the the aporia. The paradigm of the state either is a product of
"legal" in modern orientalist scholarship on Islamic law, Western history or enjoys a ubiquitous presence over and
which fails to "appreciate both the legal ramifications of above it. Likewise, the Sharfa is either that which is upheld
'ibãdãt and the moral ramifications of those 'strictly legal' by Muslims - how to collate the ethical universe of all
provisions of muamalãt" { pp. 116, 149). As an exemplar of Muslims, or even the paradigmatic Muslim left with
the true Sharfa, Hallaq parades the famed eleventh-century a question mark - and expounded in scholarship on Islam
theologian al-Ghazzāll, who captured the paradigmatically or it exists in spite of them. To pretend that the paradigms
moral essence of the Sharfa in his "mystical Shar'ism." of state and Sharfa were born, however abstrusely, in a
Ghazzālī braided law and morality to reveal the full sig- moment outside history - even if as ideals - but deter-
nificance of rituals of piety, or "the moral technologies of the mined the very course of that history, and that in another
self," in Hallaq's borrowed nomenclature. phoenix-inspired moment, they may be coaxed to self-
If Ghazzālī' s moral reading of the 4 ibãdãt is absent from destruct, is to forgo much of the rational, epistemological
modern scholarship on the Sharfa, and that is taken as foundations of modern thought.
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