The Imperative of a Decolonial Shari‘ah Imaginary

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
— Macaulay’s Minute on Education, 2 February 1835

In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to the question of Muslim representation. Indeed, it is incontestable that one who appears in public life, and speaks on behalf of communities, who is to be regarded as a legitimate participant in political, cultural, and intellectual discourse, is a matter of communal concern. Yet representation, while imperative, is not sufficient. The presence of Muslim individuals in the public sphere alone does not transform the categories through which Islam and Muslims are understood.

This limitation has become increasingly evident. Muslims may now appear more frequently in public discourses, but the conceptual frameworks that structure these discourses remain unchanged. Paradoxically, these frameworks make room for Muslim visibility while still constraining the religious vernacular, commitments, and subjectivities through which Muslims understand themselves. In this sense, representation may expand without unsettling the deeper paradigms through which Islam is rendered intelligible. Muslims may be seen and heard, but only insofar as their presence remains legible within a secular and liberal context that often determines in advance what religion is, where it belongs, and what kinds of religious claims are permissible.

This is particularly evident in relation to the Shari‘ah. Fearmongering around the term has become commonplace. At times, Shari‘ah is left untranslated and deployed as a specter in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. At other times, it is routinely translated as “Islamic law”, a rendering that appears convenient but is conceptually inadequate. This translation immediately places the Shari‘ah within the modern grammar of law: legislation, codification, courts, enforcement, and the authority of the state. Once this translation is accepted, the question of the Shari‘ah is framed in advance, and often it is framed in conflict with other legal orders as the Shari‘ah is reduced to a body of rules, legal penalties, state authority and religious enforcement, all leading to political anxiety. And even if the Shari‘ah is not immediately placed in conflict with other legal orders, the conceptual field of the Shari’ah is still limited to Greco-Romanic conceptions of law and order with any substantive discussion of the horizons of the Shari‘ah left unexplored.

Muslims praying at the Sultanahmet Mosque during the night of Laylat al-Qadr. © IMAGO / SOPA Images / Tunahan Turhan

Crucially, this narrowing is not simply the result of an imprecise translation. It reflects a deeper epistemological condition. Many of the categories through which Muslims today think about religion, law, authority, reform, and freedom have been shaped by modern liberal and colonial formations. This, however, does not mean that Muslims are simply passive recipients of Western thought, nor does it suggest that Islamic traditions exist outside history. Rather, it means that the terrain on which Islam is publicly discussed has been significantly structured by concepts emerging from specific histories of secularism, colonial governance, and the modern nation-state. Within this scaffolding, Muslims voices were, and continue to be, marginal.

For over a decade, I have taught at Georgetown University in Qatar, an American institution located in a former British protectorate, in a country that has undergone rapid modernization within the span of half a century. Before that, I taught in American, Canadian, and British universities. Across these contexts, I have been repeatedly struck by the extent to which Islam is made publicly legible through categories that are not always adequate to its own intellectual and normative traditions. Religion is often approached as private belief, law as rules and state enforcement, freedom as individual autonomy, and reform as movement toward a predetermined liberal horizon. These assumptions are rarely neutral. They shape not only how Islam is represented by others, but also how Muslims come to describe and defend their own tradition.

How, then, might the Shari‘ah be understood by contemporary Muslims? I argue the first step is the creation of a new terrain: a decolonial Shari‘ah imaginary. It begins by refusing to reduce Shari‘ah to “Islamic law” or to approach it primarily as a body of substantive rules. A decolonial approach to the Shari‘ah is thus not, in the first instance, a question of legal reform. It is a matter of recovering the intellectual and moral vocabulary capable of describing the Shari‘ah on terms that are not reducible to the modern state’s understanding of law. Historically, the Shari‘ah was not a code, nor was it identical with the rulings of courts. It referred to a divine path, a normative horizon, and a broad tradition of reasoning about how human beings ought to live before God and with one another. It included law, but it was not exhausted by law: it encompassed juristic method, ethical formation, social practice, devotional life, communal obligation, and interpretive disagreement.

This distinction matters because colonialism did not only impose new laws upon Muslim societies, but in fact transformed the institutional and epistemological conditions through which law was known and practiced. In many colonial contexts, Islamic legal institutions were displaced or subordinated, juristic plurality was reduced through codification, and adjudicative authority was increasingly centralized in the state. At the same time, it would be inaccurate to say the Shari‘ah was erased. In some cases, particularly in matters of family law, it was preserved. Yet this preservation was itself transformative. A juristic and socially embedded tradition was rendered into administrable doctrine. Legal opinions that once existed within broader fields of debate were selected, fixed, and enforced as state law.

Historically, the Shari‘ah was not a code, nor was it identical with the rulings of courts. It referred to a divine path, a normative horizon, and a broad tradition of reasoning about how human beings ought to live before God and with one another.

The consequences of this transformation remain with us today. In many modern Muslim societies and diasporas, the Shari‘ah is encountered primarily as personal status law: marriage, divorce, custody, inheritance, guardianship, and family relations. These are important domains, but their elevation as the privileged site of Shari‘ah has had significant effects. It has contributed to the perception that the Shari‘ah is primarily concerned with the regulation of family and gender, and that Islamic normativity is most visible when it appears in the form of state-administered rules. The result is a constricted legal imagination in which the Shari‘ah is simultaneously defended, feared, refor-med, and politicized as “law” in the modern sense.

A decolonial Shari‘ah imaginary, then, does not simply mean replacing one ruling with another. Nor can it mean inserting selected premodern opinions into modern legal codes. Such efforts may have their place, but they do not address the deeper problem: the transformation of the imagination through which the Shari‘ah is understood. The question is not only what the Shari‘ah determines on a given issue, but what kind of intellectual, moral, and institutional world is presumed and hoped for when that question is asked.

Palestinian residents read verses from the Holy Qur’an inside the Sayyid Hashim Mosque in Gaza City  © IMAGO / Mohammed Skaik

A decolonial Shari‘ah imaginary would require several forms of recovery. It would require renewed attention to juristic plurality, not as incoherence, but as a disciplined mode of legal reasoning. It would require a more serious account of the relationship between law and ethics, so that legal norms are not severed from the moral purposes they are meant to serve. It would require institutions beyond the state through which Muslims can study, debate, mediate, and embody normative commitments. It would also require a conception of the legal subject that is not merely the abstract individual before the court, but a person situated within relationships, obligations, vulnerabilities, and capacities.

The point is not to reconstruct an idealized precolonial past or to deny the realities of modern political life. Rather, the task is to ask what colonialism and its afterlives have made difficult for us to imagine.

This is not a call for nostalgia. The point is not to reconstruct an idealized precolonial past or to deny the realities of modern political life. Rather, the task is to ask what colonialism and its afterlives have made difficult for us to imagine. Can the Shari‘ah be approached as a living tradition of reasoning rather than a fixed body of rules? Can legal authority be thought beyond codification without collapsing into arbitrariness? Can justice be understood not only as enforcement, but as the disciplined discernment of right order, moral responsibility, and human circumstance?

The imperative of a decolonial Shari‘ah imaginary lies in this work of conceptual recovery. It asks Muslims to think beyond the inherited equation of Shari‘ah with Islamic law, and to attend instead to the broader world of meaning that the term has historically carried. Until that recovery takes place, debates about the Shari‘ah will continue to unfold within categories that have already diminished it.