Abdallah Bin Bayyah (b. 1935) is considered by and large one of the most prominent contemporary legal scholars, and is one of the main proponents of the renewal of Islamic Law through the integration of the objectives of the Shar??a in the very structure of the Islamic legal methodology. Bin Bayyah tries to achieve this integration by adopting three discursive legal strategies. First, he identifies the objectives of Shariah (maq??id) with istidl?l, i.e. the rational inferences that are not based on scriptural textual considerations. Istidl?l is presented as a way to reason beyond the text or to understand the scriptural sources in the light of their intended meaning and objectives. The search for istidl?l is, in reality, a search for the ma?la?a (public interest) or maq??id (objectives). Second, Bin Bayyah sees the relation between maq??id and ?u??l fiqh as that between the universals (kuliyy?t), i.e. the objectives of Shar??a and the particulars (juz??yy?t), i.e the particular textual sources. He provides eight parameters (daw?bi?) that, in his view, guarantee the legal methodological rigorosity of ma?la?? and maq??id considerations. Third, Bin Bayyah goes further and argues that the objectives of Shariah constitute the heart of the Islamic legal methodology. To prove this point, he presents more than thirty ways in which maq??ids are blended into the texture of Islamic legal methodology (‘u??l al-fiqh). In my speech, apart from highlight the value and the significance of Bin Bayyah's legal reform project, I intend to provide a critical analysis and highlight the limits of Bin Bayyah’s project of legal reform. First, historically speaking Bin Bayyah’s identification of the objectives of Shar??a (maq??id) considerations with istidl?l is an overstretch. Historically, the maq??id considerations have not originated from istidl?l deliberations but mainly from the legal discussions connected with ratio legis (?illa) and the theological discussion on the nature of good and evil (ta?s?n w? taqb??). Secondly, I argue that for the most part, the parameters championed by Bin Bayyah are dependent on the subjective and personal rational investigation (na?ar) of the scholars. Hence, they fail to equip the objectives of Shar??a with the methodological rigor and objectivity required by u??l al-fiqh. Lastly, the cases presented by Bin Bayyah to prove that maq???d are the heart of u??l come into play only when strictly u??l? deliberations fail to provide the sound legal outcome. Therefore, the maq??id? factor, albeit part of u??l al-fiqh, is still an auxiliary dimension.

Near the beginning of the work that would define his career, the nineteenth century Mauritanian scholar, al-N?bighah al-Ghal?w? (d. 1828), wrote, “This is a survey of the unreliable material in texts.” The admission was odd. A precocious legal scholar and grammarian, al-Ghal?w? began writing the treatise, named B? Tlay?iyah in local dialect, while still in his late twenties. A split with his teacher led to a career teaching and issuing legal opinions until his untimely death. Over the next decade he frequently condemned the declining standards of education, most notably in a three hundred verse poem dedicated to untrustworthy texts. Though its introduction failed to specify which genre of scholarship he had in mind, his target was clear. Islamic law, according to al-Ghal?w?, was in desperate need of repair. Jurisprudence had grown stale from centuries of imitation. He lamented that works riddled with mistakes thrived while meticulously researched alternatives were all but forgotten. Impatient students rarely ventured beyond the most popular texts, rushing from introductory manuals to complex treatises in months. Few grasped what they read. Less still seemed to be aware that other works of law existed at all. Al-Ghal?w?’s text is exceptional. Though searing critique of the legal establishment was hardly uncommon, few resembled al-Ghal?w?’s work. He was himself a devoted scholar-jurist of the Maliki school. He had little interest in reformism that marginalized classical legal scholarship. Nor was he concerned with the debates of internal madhhab polemics. He criticized the texts of Mauritanians and Egyptians with equal regard, censuring the views of authorities and novices alike. Ostensibly a super-commentary of the fourteenth century Maliki treatise, the Mukhta?ar Khal?l, al-Ghal?w?’s writing appears closer to a work of book history than jurisprudence. It was a collection of Islamic legal rules considerably more concerned with the books used to justify them. My paper contemplates the Maliki legal canon through the eyes of al-Ghal?w?. It asks why, and how such a text was produced in nineteenth century Mauritania? Through local historiographies and a close reading of his work, my paper joins the study of Islamic law with history of the book. It argues that Ghal?w?’s own assessment of his school’s canonical texts reveals a considerably more nuanced picture of African Muslims and later Islamic law than is often supposed.

This paper re-examines the theology of Egyptian alim Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) through the writing of Late Ottoman sheikh ül-Islam Mustafa Sabri (1869-1954) and his radical critique of the Muslim reform (tajdid) movement. One of Mustafa Kemal’s most implacable foes, Sabri was alarmed to find Egyptian ulama and intellectuals advancing the positivist-materialist agenda he had challenged in Istanbul before fleeing in 1922. Debating the leading lights of the Egyptian modernist movement in the 1930s and 1940s, Sabri came to see its reform theology as a little more than a calque on Enlightenment notions of religion, but one that drew on the pioneering work of Abduh. The summa of Sabri’s years of polemical struggle in Egypt was Mawqif al-Aql wa-l-Ilm wa-l-Alam min Rabb al-Alamin wa-Rusulihi (The Position of Reason, Knowledge, and the World on God and His Messengers, 1949), a four-volume work – published with the support of Hasan al-Banna before his death – in which Sabri defended the Islamic epistemological system before the epochal challenge of European rationalist philosophy. In Mawqif al-Aql Sabri launched a comprehensive attack on Abduh for what he saw as: Abduh’s failure to defend Islam’s role in public life in his famous 1900 debate with newspaper editor Farah Antun; a scepticism towards unseen paranormal phenomena (al-khawariq) such as angels, the resurrection, and miracles; downgrading the prophets to the status of “great reformers” (al-uzama' al-muslihun) among men; rejection of one of the kalam proofs of God’s existence known as burhan al-tatbiq in favour of the infinite causal chain; and indulgence of European accusations of fatalism in the Ash'ari creedal system. Sabri argues for a firm link between Abduh’s ideas and the modernist innovations of Egypt’s liberal age that stripped Islam of non-empirical understandings of the created world and diminished divine intervention in man’s affairs in favour of human agency. Zahid al-Kawthari, Sabri’s deputy at the Ottoman Meshihat who also found refuge in Egypt, was only mildly less scathing about Abduh, apparently sensing in Abduh’s Risalat al-Tawhid a tendency towards Maturidi thinking on free will. Examining Sabri’s work in Istanbul and Cairo, Abduh’s early and later writing, and key texts of the islamiyyat literature discussed by Albert Hourani, Charles Adams, Israel Gershoni, and others, the paper will evaluate Sabri’s claims and ask whether the Ottoman exiles were the first to establish the discourse of rejection that came to dominate Muslim views of Abduh.

Jamaladdin al-Afghani (1838-1897) emerges in the history of Muslim reformism as a pioneering figure who proposes reformed religion as the basis of civilization and the means to effectively resist European imperialism. Arguably, Afghani’s transnational influence on the subsequent reformists overshadowed the merits of Nahda era’s preceding attempts at religious and political reform, most significantly that of the Tunisian reformist circles and in particular Khayraddin al-Tunisi (1820-1890). To his credit, Tunisi could appear in intellectual history surveys as the earliest figure to propose modern parliaments as the embodiment of the Islamic principle of shura. However, the full scope of his theory of good government, epitomized by his defense of liberty, to account for the rise of European civilization is understudied. In this paper I argue that although most scholars lump Afghani and Tunisi together as modernist thinkers, they radically differ from each other: Tunisi, following Rifaa al-Tahtawi, approached the question of reform on the ethical level. European ideas and institutions were products of human reason that could better organize societies irrespective of the “foreign” nature of their homeland. Afghani, in contrast, borrowing from Guizot’s civilizational theory, posited religion as the only path to civilization. In this scheme, as laid out in Refutation of Naturalists (1881), even an incorrect religion would uphold the moral order of society, while a non-theistic vision, aside from being an impossible endeavor, would corrupt morals and bring down the human civilization. Although widely taken as a polemic against his opponents, Afghani’s framework provided the subsequent reformers with a new agenda of revitalization of the Islamic civilization. His Islamist followers employed this as the common trope to defend Islamic exclusivism and authenticity. While Tunisi’s focus on the ethical betterment of Muslim societies allowed for reconciliation with whatever is “good” among the Europeans, Afghani made ethics singularly contingent on faith, disallowing non-theistic ethics and charting a morally exclusionary course for subsequent Muslim reformers. The paper will analyze the contours of the shift from ethics to ontology as the focal point of Muslim reformism by juxtaposing Afghani’s Refutation with Tunisi’s The Surest Path (1863). What appears as a linear Muslim reformist thought that imports certain modern ideas into Islam, in fact represents two opposing threads. Therefore, Afghani’s morally exclusionary framework emerges as an aberration from the earlier path by foreclosing ethically more generous formations of Muslim reform and in turn more democratic options in Muslim political thought.

This paper traces a transnational project of identity-formation undertaken by al-Sayyid Muhsin al-Amin al-Hussainy (1865-1952), a prominent Shi’i Scholar from Jabal Amil. He traveled from his hometown to Iraq and Iran in 1933 in order to visit the shrines of Shi’i Imams and find resources for writing his biographical dictionary about distinguished Shi’i figures, titled A’yan al-Shi’a. Shi’a religious scholars are usually seen within a sectarian framework, which assumes the purpose of their activities as being either in opposition to the mainstream (Sunni) Islamic norms or as trying to alleviate the “sectarian tensions” between Shi’is and Sunnis. By closely reading Muhsin al-Amin’s major writings, primarily focusing on A’yan al-Shi’a and his travelogue written during his trips to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, this paper goes beyond the Shi’i/Sunni binary and sheds light on the social aspect of a seemingly theological “sectarian” effort. The primary question of this research is what Muhsin al-Amin’s writings tell us about the Shi’i experience of identity-formation in the early twentieth century. I first argue that Muhsin al-Amin’s works can be read as a project of knowledge production, which aimed to unify authoritative sources for Shi’i knowledge, thus producing modern rational Shi’i identity. This knowledge production was a response to an institutional threat that Muhsin al-Amin perceived against Shi’a communities in countries with growing nationalist and/or imperialist forces. The second part of my argument is about the details of this knowledge formation project. I discuss the way Muhsin al-Amin chose to present the Shi’is in the biographical dictionary and in the travelogue and I demonstrate how different processes of inclusion and exclusion emerge to help him in placing the Twelver Shi’i as part of the Muslim/Arab world. These rhetorical tools and processes also aided him in distinguishing the Twelver Shi’i community and its beliefs from 1) other non-acceptable Shi’i communities, 2) the wrong accusations historically attributed to them 3) the un-Islamic, baseless, and superstitions or irrational practices that are either harmful or have no use, with which the Twelver Shi’is, often lower class “lay” shi’is, might engage. Along the same line, I show how Muhsin al-Amin’s narration of writing A’yan al-Shi’a stands out as something in contrast to those irrational and useless behavior from which the Sh’i community should be distinguished. Therefore, this paper also demonstrates how making hierarchies between different types of practices and beliefs became a useful tool for preserving a religious community under threat.