Shari'a Law and Modern Muslim Ethics

Description

Many Muslim societies are in the throes of tumultuous political transitions, and common to all has been heightened debate over the place of sharia law in modern politics and ethical life. Bringing together leading scholars of Islamic politics, ethics, and law, this book examines the varied meanings and uses of Islamic law, so as to assess the prospects for democratic, plural, and gender-equitable Islamic ethics today. These essays show that, contrary to the claims of some radicals, Muslim understandings of Islamic law and ethics have always been varied and emerge, not from unchanging texts but from real and active engagement with Islamic traditions and everyday life. The ethical debates that rage in contemporary Muslim societies reveal much about the prospects for democratic societies and a pluralist Islamic ethics in the future. They also suggest that despite the tragic violence wrought in recent years by Boko Haram and the Islamic State in Iraq, we may yet see an age of ethical renewal across the Muslim world.

Acknowledgements
A Note on Transliteration
Contributors

1. Sharia Law and the Quest for a Modern Muslim Ethics. Robert W. Hefner
Section 1: Sharia Pluralities
2. Sharia and the Rule of Law. Anver M. Enom
3. Moral Contestations and Patriarchal Ethics: Women Challenging the Justice of Muslim Family Laws. Ziba Mir-Hosseini
4. Gender, Legality, and Public Ethics in Morocco. Zakia Salime
Section 2: Islamic Law and the State
5. Constitutionalizing a Democratic Muslim State without Sharia: The Religious Establishment in the Tunisian 2014 Constitution. Malika Zeghal
6. Transformations in Muslim Views about "Forbidding Wrong": The Rise and Fall of Islamist Litigation in Egypt. Clark B. Lombardi and Connie J. Cannon
7. Sharia, Islamic Ethics, and Democracy: The Crisis of the "Turkish Model." Ahmet T. Kuru
8. Islamic Modernism, Ethics, and Sharia in Pakistan. Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Section 3: New Ethical Imbrications
9. "Sharia" as a Moving Target? The Reconfiguration of Regional and National Fields of Muslim Debate in Mali. Dorothea E. Schulz
10. Syariah, Inc.: Continuities, Transformations, and Cultural Politics in Malaysia's Islamic Judiciary. Michael G. Peletz
11. Islamic Ethics and Muslim Feminism in Indonesia. Robert W. Hefner

Sujets

• Islamic
• Droit et juridique
• Malasia
• Marruecos
• Malaysia
• Sharia
• Southeast Asia
• North Africa
• Middle East
• Indonesia
• Malaisie
• LAW
• Morocco
• Islam
• Indonésie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 29 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253022608
• Langue: English

Extrait

SHARI A LAW AND MODERN MUSLIM ETHICS
SHARI A LAW AND MODERN MUSLIM ETHICS
Edited by Robert W. Hefner
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hefner, Robert W., 1952-, editor.
Title: Shari a law and modern Muslim ethics / edited by Robert W. Hefner.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016021951 (print) | LCCN 2016022780 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253022479 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253022523 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253022608 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Islamic law-Philosophy. | Law and ethics. | Islamic ethics.
Classification: LCC KBP444 .S43 2016 (print) | LCC KBP444 (ebook) | DDC
297.5-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021951
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
1 Shari a Law and the Quest for a Modern Muslim Ethics
Robert W. Hefner
Section I: Shari a Pluralities
2 Shari a and the Rule of Law
Anver M. Emon
3 Moral Contestations and Patriarchal Ethics: Women Challenging the Justice of Muslim Family Laws
Ziba Mir-Hosseini
4 Gender, Legality, and Public Ethics in Morocco
Zakia Salime
Section II: Islamic Law and the State
5 Constitutionalizing a Democratic Muslim State without Shari a: The Religious Establishment in the Tunisian 2014 Constitution
Malika Zeghal
6 Transformations in Muslim Views about Forbidding Wrong : The Rise and Fall of Islamist Litigation in Egypt
Clark B. Lombardi and Connie J. Cannon
7 Shari a, Islamic Ethics, and Democracy: The Crisis of the Turkish Model
Ahmet T. Kuru
8 Islamic Modernism, Ethics, and Shari a in Pakistan
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Section III: New Ethical Imbrications
9 Shari a as a Moving Target? The Reconfiguration of Regional and National Fields of Muslim Debate in Mali
Dorothea E. Schulz
10 Syariah, Inc.: Continuities, Transformations, and Cultural Politics in Malaysia s Islamic Judiciary
Michael G. Peletz
11 Islamic Ethics and Muslim Feminism in Indonesia
Robert W. Hefner
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS VOLUME WAS the product of a two-year project organized at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at the Pardee School of Global Affairs at Boston University. The project was funded by the Luce Foundation and an anonymous donor. I thank the Luce Foundation and Religion Program Director Toby Volkman for their generous support and institutional vision. No foundation I know has done more to address the importance of religion in contemporary global affairs.
I also thank Dean Adil Najam of the Pardee School for his continuing support of programs on religion and world affairs at the Pardee School.
Finally, I thank Dee Mortensen, editorial director at Indiana University Press, for her care and skill in ushering this volume through the production process in an engaging and productive manner.
A Note on Transliteration
A S THE CASE studies in this book indicate, the contributors to this volume draw on a broad array of languages, each with its own conventions of transliteration and spelling of Arabic and local-language words. In the interest of consistency, we have kept the transliteration of non-English terms to a minimum. With the exception of the to indicate the Arabic letter ayn (as in shari a) and to indicate the hamza (as in Qur an), we have dispensed with diacritical marks in this volume. The hamza is, moreover, indicated within words (as in Qur an) but not at their ends.
Arabic-derived words are rendered in different ways in non-Arabic languages; indeed, in some languages, such as Malay and Indonesian, the rendering can appear quite different from the Arabic original. Our preference throughout the volume has been to render words used in all of the book s chapters, such as shari a, in a uniform manner, but in some cases (as in the chapter on Malaysia), we have deferred to the wishes of the author when retaining a local spelling was important for conveying the word s local colorings. Except when discussing ulama (singular: alim ), we have also usually indicated the plural form of Arabic terms by adding an s to the singular form-thus fatwas rather than fatawa and madrasas rather than madaris . Finally, Arabic words that occur frequently throughout the volume are not italicized.
SHARI A LAW AND MODERN MUSLIM ETHICS
1
Shari a Law and the Quest for a Modern Muslim Ethics
Robert W. Hefner
I N RECENT YEARS many Muslim-majority societies have undergone complex and difficult political transitions. As in Indonesia and Tunisia, some of these passages have been from authoritarian rule to a significant measure of democracy and citizen rights. As in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, however, other transitions began with hope but soon gave rise to a barrage of state and societal violence that left the national landscape anything but civil or democratic.
Whatever the precise course of events, common to all these transitions has been heightened debate over the role of shari a law and Islamic ethics in politics and social life. Across the world today, prominent Muslim democrats invoke shari a and Islamic values to justify calls for democracy, pluralist tolerance, and gender equality (see Abou el Fadl 2001, 2004; Moosa 2001; Ramadan 2009). At the same time, however, radical movements such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Boko Haram in West Africa cite what they insist are shari a principles to legitimize rejection of democracy, enslavement of non-Muslim women, and mass killing of so-called apostates. Two generations ago, the idea that disputes over the forms and meanings of Islamic law and ethics might figure prominently in Muslim politics would have struck most observers as unthinkable-but no longer. The pervasiveness of appeals to shari a in today s upheavals, as well as the existence of conflicting interpretations of Islamic values, shows that understanding the struggles of the Muslim world requires a coming to terms with the varied meanings and uses of Islamic law and ethics.
The chapters in this book aim to provide just such an understanding. They are the product of a two-year collaboration that began in March 2013 with a workshop at Boston University s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs and that ended in early 2015. 1 The collaborators in this project came together in response to modern changes in politics and ethics in the Muslim world. In early 2011, the transitions collectively known as the Arab Spring had just gotten under way. Notwithstanding initially encouraging events, reform-minded proponents of democracy and citizenship in many lands soon found themselves challenged by rivals who dismissed democracy as being incompatible with Islam and who called for a new order based on their own understandings of shari a law. By the time of our workshop, events in Syria and Libya no longer instilled springtime optimism but instead cast dark shadows of concern.
The quickened pace of developments did not end there. The first months of 2014 saw an explosion of killing, rape, and enslavement on the parts of Boko Haram and ISIL (Hanne and Flichy de la Neuville 2014). Mali, once known for its robust democracy, remained mired in an ethnic and Islamist insurgency (see chapter 9 , Schulz). The Pakistani government, a beacon of modernist progressivism only two generations earlier, had difficulty recruiting clerical allies for its antiradical campaigns (see chapter 8 , Zaman). Turkey, until recently seen as a model of democracy for the Muslim Middle East, saw its once moderate Islamist leadership impose draconian restrictions on the press as well as on opposition groups (see chapter 7 , Kuru).
But not all news from Muslim lands was dire. In the 2010s, an international coalition of Muslim feminists known as Musawah had established branches in dozens of Muslim-majority countries, invoking Islamic values in the cause of gender-equity reform (see chapter 3 , Mir-Hosseini). In Morocco, the astonishingly open public debate surrounding a young woman s rape, marriage, and subsequent suicide revealed that new ideas of gender dignity had taken hold among a broad swath of Moroccan youth (see chapter 4 , Salime). Moreover, over the course of 2014, Tunisian parliamentarians succeeded in crafting a boldly democratic constitution (see chapter 5 , Zeghal). Indonesia in the 2010s was well into in its second decade of impressive democratic reform, with women s groups helping lead the way (see chapter 11 , Hefner). However, what made the course of Muslim-world developments so perplexing was that actors and movements on all sides regularly invoked Islamic law a