Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women

One of the enduring aspects of Islam is the egalitarianism within its faith-community. There is no central authority handing down edicts to be obeyed unquestionably by the followers; nor there is one school of thought that reigns supreme over others. The long and illustrious history of Islamic jurisprudence is marked by its indeterminancy and ever evolving standards, owing to its juristic diversity and culture of disputations. Its methodological tools are designed to put the legal principles through rigorous accountability tests and constant checks and balances. Uniformity and codification of Islamic legal principles have hitherto been a rare jurisprudential practice until very recently. The concept of authoritativeness of Islamic law, by way of hermeneutics, and its authoritarian by-product, is the main thrust of this provocative yet fascinating and detail-rich book by Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women.

While there is no central authoritative institution in Islam, Muslims do have to follow the injunctions of God and the teachings and practices of Prophet Muhammad through the holy text, al-Qur'an, and Sunnah (reported sayings and actions of the Prophet). These two sources of law, in fact, act as the ultimate reference to guide Muslims in every aspects of life; hence their authoritativeness. But total and unfettered comprehension of God's law is beyond the finite reach of human minds, which then requires the services of select and highly learned interpreters, who El Fadl called “special agents,” to closely approximate the Divine principles (53). Human fallibility such as ideological and cultural bias also explains why the veracity of Sunnah has to be thoroughly investigated, especially when it results in significant theological, legal, and sociological impact. The uncertainty of this interpretive process is the hallmark of Islamic jurisprudence and its intellectual vibrancy, which is now slowly eroded by myopic attempt to universalize and codify a stringent and unyielding set of principles over others. This is what El Fadl meant by the authoritarian nature of the text or interpretive despotism—its malleability allows for shrewd manipulation by agenda-driven party.

Traditionally, the special agents, in their capacity as the interpreters of God’s law, played a mediative, semi-autonomous role, negotiating between the state and various social forces (15). They were the chosen ones, or in El Fadl’s words, “a specialized professional class” (61)—not unlike the philosopher-kings of Plato—endowed with supreme knowledge through long educational training and the moral virtue of the highest order, who then were able to faithfully represent God’s will on Earth. El Fadl lists five criteria that form the character of a special agent: honesty, diligence, comprehensiveness, reasonableness, and self-restraint, along with being pious and extremely knowledgeable (54-56). While these are very commendable normative criteria, their abstract nature does not allow for consistent treatment of their actual meanings. Even people, who in El Fadl’s eyes fall short of these criteria, can claim to be special agents by exploiting the meanings of these five contingencies through various means, particularly institutional association. The criteria, in a sense, are a matter of perception, of how these special agents are viewed through the eyes of the public; therefore, what El-Fadl constitutes as the substances of these criteria, vary across the socio-political landscape. Special agents, say, by virtue of association with the venerable Al-Azhar in Egypt, can claim to be legitimate without explicitly satisfying the five criteria—that is, for as long as the public sees Al-Azhar as the paragon of Islamic learning and the unimpeachable disseminator of Islamic knowledge. Similarly, C.R.L.O.’s association with the Saudi government, which is viewed, though not unanimously, as the guardian of Islamic heritage, supplies it with the needed legitimacy to issue rulings that are amenable to not just the domestic population, but also large segments of Muslim communities worldwide.

This, in turn, brings up the question of how much the attempt at codifying and universalizing Islamic principles is about simplicity and efficacy, and not about naked projection of power and domination? Could it be that the advent of nation-states contributes to the decline of classical Islamic jurisprudential culture in the past three hundred years? Could the state and its monopoly on coercion within a territorial boundary, as defined by Max Weber, provides certain groups of Islamic jurists the opportunity to circumvent the laborious tradition and practices of Islamic legal scholarship and its inherent uncertainty by exploiting state’s coercive apparatuses to advance and impose their brand of God’s will upon the society at-large? The cozy association between the religious scholars and the state certainly points to this direction. Furthermore, the association is mutually-beneficial: the state is able to derive its legitimacy from the religious establishment, while the religious establishment gets to assert its supremacy over other competing groups through the hegemonic power of the state. This is the question that escapes the scope of the book, but understandably, it is about the intricacies of Islamic jurisprudence and its dire need for rejuvenation. Still, it seems incomplete to explain the interpretive despotism of the text without enunciating the dynamics between the special agents and the institutions of power i.e. the state. Interpretive hegemony, presumably, could not be attained independent of a deep-reaching institutional support, and it could be one of the explanations why this phenomenon is more prevalent now than it was in the past.

All in all, this is a brilliant scholarship by El Fadl to debunk the prevailing notions that Islamic jurisprudence is seemingly trapped in a time-warp and its principles are incompatible with the evolving standards of the modern age. Its publication is especially timely considering that there are a lot of confusions about what constitute as cultural and Islamic practices, and more importantly, the abuses of religious scholarship in the name of preserving deeply unjust and cruel cultural practices.