The Life of Shari'a - by Youssef Belal

Book Synopsis

Is there a way to think about contemporary life with knowledge that is neither modern nor Western? Rather than confining Islam to a "religion" and shariʿa to its "law," Youssef Belal provocatively argues that Islamic shariʿa is instead a mode of knowledge with its own concepts and scholarly categories through which the world and the self are grasped. Making this case requires two major intertwined genealogies: that of how Islamic scholars formulated knowledge from the classical period to today and that of how Westerners have understood the law and how it came to be constituted. By melding these two traditions and disentangling the ways they inflect and distort our understanding of each other, Belal puts the formation of modern law and its circulation outside Europe under a new light. He offers both a compelling revisionist account of shariʿa in the history of Islam and a powerful argument for its continued relevance to the life of contemporary Muslims.

From the Back Cover

"Our lives are ruled by law. But what if law were life? What if it were the knowledge, the ordering of knowledges, necessary to live? Every law? Shari'a, Youseff Belal demonstrates, is in fragments, but these fragments are remarkable pathways to self and other, lives known and unknown, worlds visible and invisible. A phenomenal achievement." --Gil Anidjar, author of The Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal

"The first truly comparative and conceptually sophisticated study of Islamic law, Belal's book exits the closed world of so much Islamic scholarship to embed his subject in a world of unexpected connections as well as contrasts." --Faisal Devji, Professor of History at Oxford University

"A breathtaking work of scholarship that offers a new genealogy of Western law through the perspective of shari'a, this book opens up an ethical vision that links the seen and unseen worlds to an ethics in and of the public sphere." --Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

About the Author

Youssef Belal is an anthropologist and political theorist. He is also a UN diplomat and peace mediator who served as political director of UN missions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, and was named a member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in 2016. He is author of Le cheikh et le calife: Sociologie religieuse de l'Islam politique au Maroc (The sheikh and the caliph: Religious sociology of political Islam in Morocco).