The life of Shari’a by Youssef Belal A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Stefania Pandolfo Professor Saba Mahmood Professor Brinkley Messick Professor Niklaus Largier Summer 2017 © Copyright 2017 by Youssef Belal All Rights Reserved Abstract The life of Shari’a by Youssef Belal Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Stefania Pandolfo, Chair This dissertation is a conceptual inquiry about Shari’a exploring distinct and yet interrelated dimensions of the revealed law of Islam: (i) political, (ii) spiritual, (iii) ethical, (iv) epistemic and (v) rational. These dimensions are studied from the perspective of Sunni Islam in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Egypt on the basis of a fieldwork conducted in Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo in 2012-2014, as well as of works by classical and contemporary Islamic scholars. This study of Shari’a is guided by the following questions: What kind of political subjectivity is enabled by Islamic jurisprudence when dealing with revolutionary protests, power, and order? What kind of spirituality is entailed by Shari’a rules? To what extent is Shari’a a kind of law distinct from contemporary state law that gives shape to a form of ethical life based on the relationship between acts of worship and social interactions? Under what epistemic conditions does revealed speech call for deeds? How does the Islamic legal episteme involve the use of reason in relationship to revelation? This dissertation shows that any attempt to deepen our understanding of Shari’a and the epistemic and cultural practices associated with it requires the study not only of jurisprudence (fiqh) and the sources of jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) but also of other forms of knowledge such as Sufism, theology (kalam), and philosophy and the ways in which they are intertwined with the revealed law. It brings to light the epistemic language and the evidential regime displayed in shared assumptions and agreements between Islamic scholars versed in these disciplines as much as in disagreements between them. In the light of this research, this dissertation reconsiders several theses which have been influential in the study of Shari’a. First, it reassesses the claim that Shari’a should be studied merely as a juridical law enforced by a central authority. Second, it revisits the thesis of Shari’a’s demise in modern times. Third, it recasts the thesis according to which Shari’a is set in opposition to spirituality, ethics, philosophy and rationality. Finally, if modernity is understood as the regime of separation of between knowledge, religion, law, ethics and politics understood as autonomous spheres within the modern polity, then my dissertation is an invitation to question this normative assumption and to think about the intertwinement of all these dimensions in Islam. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Introduction 1 Part I: Politics 8 Chapter 1: Fatwa, interiority and jurisprudence of the revolution 9 Chapter 2: Law, revolution and sovereignty in comparative perspective 25 Part II: Spirituality 30 Chapter 3: Spiritual ethics in contemporary Egypt 31 Chapter 4: The spiritual topography of the self in classical Islam 46 Chapter 5: Truth of the law and truth of the self 58 Excursus 69 Chapter 6: Ethics, law and interiority: a western genealogy 70 Part III: Relational ethics 88 Chapter 7: Worship, social interactions and the life of Shari’a 89 Chapter 8: Worship, social interactions and Islamic legal knowledge 99 Part IV: Episteme 114 Chapter 9: Revealed speech and the sources of jurisprudence 115 Chapter 10: Revealed speech and ijtihad 126 Part V: Reason 135 Chapter 11: Modernist reason and Shari’a 136 Chapter 12: Islamic reason 152 Conclusion 172 Bibliography 176 i Acknowledgements Many colleagues and friends have helped bring this research project to fruition. I would like to thank the members of the reading committee –Stefania Pandolfo, Brinkley Messick, Saba Mahmood and Niklaus Largier- for their comments and insights throughout this project. This project has also benefited from stimulating discussions with Judith Butler and Talal Asad. Bill Hanks, Laura Nader, Paul Rabinow and Lawrence Cohen have been keen to share their views at various stages in my research. Needless to say, this dissertation would not have been possible without the warm welcome of many eminent Islamic men of knowledge who animate the daily scholarly circles in Al-Azhar Mosque. The Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley gave me forums to present my work to a larger audience. Financial support for fieldwork was provided by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Support for writing the dissertation was provided by the Doctoral Completion Fellowship administered through the Graduate Division and the Department of Anthropology. ii Introduction This dissertation is a conceptual inquiry about Shari’a and explores distinct and yet interrelated dimensions of the revealed law of Islam that are usually separated from each other in specialized scholarship: (i) political (ii) spiritual, (iii) ethical, (iv) epistemic and (v) rational. This work studies these dimensions of Shari’a from the perspective of Sunni Islam in revolutionary and post- revolutionary Egypt, as guided by my fieldwork conducted in Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo—one of the oldest and most important centers of Islamic learning—in 2012-2014, as well as by works by classical and contemporary Islamic scholars in the fields of Islamic jurisprudence, philosophy, theology (kalam) and Sufism. I believe this area of study constitutes a key contribution to interdisciplinary fields such as anthropology and Islamic studies and is an invitation to a journey within the cultural distinctiveness of the revealed law of Islam that would help us understand its continuous significance for Muslims. This dissertation explores the epistemic conditions of production of Shari’a knowledge (epistemic and rational) as well as the conditions of its reception by its subjects (spiritual and ethical dimensions) and by its community for regulative purposes (political dimension). It is an attempt to have a better understanding of the specificity of forms of knowledge and practices associated with Shari’a but also a way to question normative assumptions of modernity. If we understand modernity as the regime of separation between knowledge, religion, law, ethics and politics instituted as autonomous spheres within the modern polity, then my research is an invitation to think about the intertwinement of all these dimensions in Islam. The western trajectory of law is the standard against which Islamic jurisprudence is usually assessed, not without prejudices. One of these prejudices as formulated for example in Legal Orientalism but also in more recent writings about Shari’a assumes that Shari’a is not law proper on the ground that it is based on revelation rather than the exclusive product of human reasoning. The intertwinement of Islamic jurisprudence with ethics is also considered as an “anomaly” as “rational law” should never be subjected to ethical considerations. According to one of the main scholars of Legal Orientalism, Joseph Schacht: “None of the modern distinctions, between private and public law, or between civil and penal law, exists within the religious law of Islam; there is even no clear separation of worship, ethics and law proper. The concept of any systematic distinction is lacking”1. For Schacht, one should rely on “the broad systematic divisions of modern legal science to throw into relief not only what is peculiar to it but also what is missing there”2. One may be easily tempted to reproduce the distinction made by Schacht between the legal and the non-legal in the study of Islamic jurisprudence because the regime of separation between “religion”, “law” and “ethics”, along with other categories (economy, politics) is constitutive of the narratives of modernity as well as the assumptions on which modern forms of social organization are based. If one takes for example the relationship between law and ethics assumed by Schacht, the latter is based on the widely shared understanding that the (amoral) law exclusively authored by the state organizes collective life while morality belongs primarily to the realm of individual consciousness 1 Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, p.113. 2 Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, p.114. 1 exemplified by Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals3. This conception of law and ethics has shaped, as much as it has been the result of the Lutheran Reformation as well as the emergence of the modern state’s monopoly over legislation as theorized notably by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century4. In this dissertation, I am interested in studying Islamic law, or more precisely, Islamic jurisprudence with the following understanding: (i) Islamic jurisprudence relates revealed speech to facts, events and deeds, (ii) Islamic jurisprudence requires from scholars a work of interpretation of revealed speech and reasoning out of which rules can be formulated, and (iii) revealed speech as displayed in the Quran and the Sunna (reported sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) is the ground of evidence for jurisprudential reasoning and argumentation. Islamic scholars cannot utter a legal opinion without evidence grounded in revealed speech, and while they may not agree on which evidence can be relied on to formulate a rule, they still agree on what makes a textual passage from the Quran and the Sunna acceptable as evidence for legal reasoning. It is on the basis of this understanding of Islamic jurisprudence that I am interested in its relationship to politics, spirituality, ethics, knowledge and rationality that are, as I will show, constitutive dimensions of Shari’a.