Contemporary attempts to articulate a history of Islamic law necessarily make one of two assumptions: either that Islamic legal discourse 1) can codify and systematize – completely, seamlessly, and without mediation – universal, divine truths accessible in all circumstances across time; or 2) articulates, even where derived hermeneutically or analogically from a divine source or set of principles, the contingent opinions (fatawa) of necessarily fallible scholars that together produce an intrinsically pluralist, dynamic, and evolving set of discursive traditions. I will call the former position “positivist” and the latter “pluralist,” noting the historicity of epistemological skepticism across disciplines in the Muslim world and its continuities with post-structuralist and critical theory. This paper argues that the longstanding cohabitation in the Muslim world of multiple legal discourses predicated on sometimes conflicting principles (for instance, social utility versus an individual ethical injunction, or an individual right versus a social proscription) and produced by state and non-state actors stands opposed to the positivist vision of law with the state as its single, autonomous, sovereign source and executor. I further argue that the scholarly production of fiqh in the Islamic world must be understood as a dimension of civil society seemingly external to but nonetheless inflecting the mechanism of state legislation and thus the social production of the state. Especially given the range and flexibility of its concepts – from collective subjectivity to privacy, utility and welfare to individual ethics, social justice to property rights – Islamic law, as a decentralized, varied, but always potentially authoritative discourse within and outside the state, may serve as a tool against the concentration of not just political and military, but also social and economic power in and through the state. Indeed, the insistence in Islamic law on the circumstantial and social nature of agency and thus judgment has the potential to underwrite more explicitly collective forms of subjectivity in the postcolonial Muslim state. The political recognition of fiqh as a counter-balance to siyasa shar?iyya poses numerous risks – but so, too, does a liberal legal regime centered on the individualized subject interpellated by a state, even if more or less democratic. At this moment in history, the question must be expanded beyond the simple binary between incorporating and dismissing Islamic law in the postcolonial states of the Muslim world; it is how to historicize, re-appropriate, and evolve its open, intrinsically dynamic traditions towards the ends of pluralism, social justice, and freedom from domination.