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Professor Wael Hallaq, I am very excited and honoured to have you here with us today. You are one of the world’s foremost experts on Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history, and you very generously agreed to explain some of the intricacies of the Sharia to us.
Glad to be here. Thank you for your good invitation.
In your book “The Impossible State” you argue that an Islamic “state,” in the modern sense of the word, is impossible. You say that even modern Muslims would have difficulty accepting the basic premises of a Western-style state. Can you very briefly explain to our readers why this is?
Supposing for the moment that we grant the fact that the modern state stands for a certain moral order, my argument is that this order drastically differs from what Islam on the whole stands for.
There is no doubt that Islam is many things. It is Sharia and Sufism and many other things besides, but for us, especially nowadays, to wrap our minds around the diversity and pluralism in the Sharia and the Sufi orders would be a challenging task. The Sharia encompassed various schools, with many internal but divergent interpretations, and Sufism is as individualistic and as diverse as the Sharia, and frankly more.
Yet, in all these divergencies, and on a long spectrum of difference and variety, nowhere in Islam can a citizen-subject be raised and nurtured. To be a citizen is to be loyal, psychoepistemically, to the nation and state as the final existential desiderata. The state and nation command life and death. But the state and nation are not sufficient to command the faith and loyalty of a Muslim subject. State and nation are not and cannot be the locus of an ethical exemplar in which the meaning of life, for Muslims, resides.
It is in this context that we should understand why the example of the Prophet was so central to both the Sharia and Sufi subjectivities, which were more often than not one and the same. It is really not about the Prophet as Prophet that such ethical emulation acquired importance and centrality. It is rather because to worship an entity, the entity had to be the exemplar of the technologies of the self, the way one deliberately fashions himself or herself as an ethical subject. Without this conscious and deliberate technology there is no Islam, and as Foucault has shown us in volume after volume in his College de …
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