I have recently posted two new papers to my ssrn page. The first, titled “Is Historicism a Viable Strategy for Islamic Legal Reform? ,” explores the different possibilities historicism offers for advocates of Islamic legal reform using the example of a report attributed to the Prophet Muhammad in which he is quoted as saying “No folk who appoint a woman to lead them shall prosper.” The article, which is forthcoming in Islamic Law & Society, distinguishes between two kinds of historicism, which the article calls progressive historicism and hermeneutical historicism. The former assumes a certain kind of telos in history and interprets legal texts in light of that telos. The latter does not presume any kind of telos, but instead uses historical evidence as an interpretive tool that aids discovery of the lawgiver’s intent. I suggest that hermeneutical historicism is a more politically palatable tool for effective reform because it avoids arguments that would be theologically controversial from the perspective of the Muslim community whom the reformer wishes to influence and in fact has historical analogues in recognized juridical techniques of interpretation. The article then discusses the history of this text, exploring the various sources in which it is found and how the text had been framed differently – with important normative consequences – by various literary compilations. It also explores the history of this text within the more narrow tradition of Islamic legal reasoning, and demonstrates that it only began to be widely cited as a proof-text well after certain gender-based restrictions on public office were already accepted in Islamic law. At the same time, the article notes how this text gained wider relevance in an attempt to provide a more satisfactory textual basis to these discriminatory rules in the face of a minoritarian legal tradition which supported the limited eligibility of women to serve in various public offices. It concludes with a discussion of 20th century Muslim jurists who reject the traditional reading of this text in favor of a non-political interpretation of the report, and a discussion of why medieval jurists – despite the availability of the same kinds of arguments that modern jurists have used – never questioned the meaning of the report.
The second paper, “‘No Salvation Outside Islam’: Muslim Modernists, Democratic Politics, and Islamic Theological Exclusivism ,” takes as its starting point a controversy in liberal political theory, represented by the contrasting views of Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Rawls, on the question of religions that adhere to an exclusivist doctrine of salvation, and whether such theologies are compatible with the democratic idea of tolerance. I take up Rawls’ suggestion that democratic toleration is more likely to dilute exclusivist theological teachings than it is to be subverted by intolerant theologies of salvation by exploring the theological doctrines on the salvation of non-Muslims articulated by a prominent group of 20th century Egyptian Muslim modernist theologians. I show how they adopt pre-modern theological doctrines and transform them by widening the concept of excuse and eviscerating the obligation of inquiry so as to remove the issue of the belief or non-belief of non-Muslims from the political question of what constitutes suitable terms of cooperation. The result of this line of theological argumentation is the claim that with respect to questions of political cooperation with non-Muslims, Muslims should be indifferent to the beliefs of others, and instead concern themselves only with questions of practical justice in answering the question whether a political relationship with non-Muslims is Islamically permissible.
