Justice & Islamic Law: Mazalim Courts and Legal Reform Summary –  Jonathan Brown

The tension between the rule of law and justice is this book’s point of departure. Like many people of faith in the modern and postmodern world, Muslims live with the mental pangs caused by moments of mismatch between their scripture’s dictates and the learned justice voiced by their conscience. They take a breath of deeper resolve when a scholar tells them, as al-Saqqāf did, “Well, this is what God and the Prophet command,” hoping their faith can stand another straw laid on its back. Or they breathe easier when they hear a preacher resolve such a mismatch, as Shaltūt did (“No, that’s not what that verse means…”). though they hope the scholar offering this resolution has emerged from some desert oasis untainted by Western sensibilities, and thus that they are hearing a voice speaking authentically for Islam, all voices in the modern are compromised. To truly know that a meaning, interpretation, or belief is a coherent expression of God’s revealed message to Muhammad it must predate modernity’s rupture of our prior épistémè, Foucault’s notion of that regnant paradigm or worldview against which sense is made. An épistémè is the collection of all our unquestioned assumptions. It is the background of our minds that “determines the conditions of the possibility of all knowledge.” 12 In the last century a great swath of the world’s citizens have lived in the shadow of one epistemological