“Decolonial translation: destabilizing coloniality in secular translations of Islamic law.” Journal of Islamic Ethics 5 (2021): 250-77 – Lena Salaymeh

“Contemporary Islamic legal studies—both inside and outside the Muslim world— commonly relies upon a secular distortion of law. In this article, I use translation as a metonym for secular transformations and, accordingly, I will demonstrate how secular ideology translates the Islamic tradition. A secular translation converts the Islamic tra- dition into “religion” (the non-secular) and Islamic law into “sharia”—a term intended to represent the English mispronunciation of the Arabic word شر يعة(sharīʿah). I explore the differences between historical Islamic terms and secular terms in order to demonstrate that coloniality generates religion and religious law; in turn, these two notions convert شر يعة(sharīʿah) into “sharia” in both Arabic and non-Arabic languages. Consequently, the notion of “sharia” is part of a colonial system of meaning”