Sharia Workshop with Youssef Belal

“The Present of Shari’a: A Law With(out) Worship?”

Youssef Belal is an academic currently serving as a U.N. diplomat, with experience in conflict resolution in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan and South Sudan. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Mohammed V University in Rabat. He is the author of Le cheikh et le calife: sociologie religieuse de l’Islam politique (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, 2011). (The Sheikh and the Caliph: Political Islam from the perspective of the Sociology of Religion) and has published articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the Archives des sciences sociales des religions and Pouvoirs. He is currently finishing a book that develops a comparative anthropology of Shari’a and western law in relation to knowledge and ethics.

Through engagements with Islamic jurists and contemporary scholarship on both the Shari’a and modern state law, this paper is an invitation to raise four questions: (i) What does it mean to study acts of worship (‘ibadat) as an integral part of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh)? (ii) What does their omission tell us about assumptions regarding the categories of law and Shari’a in contemporary scholarship? (iii) To what extent does the inclusion of acts of worship in their relation to social interactions (mu’amalat) entail revisiting the thesis of the Shari’a’s demise in present times? (iv) How have contemporary Islamic scholars revisited the relationship between acts of worship and social interactions as a response to the constitution of “the present” as an epistemic problem for Islamic legal knowledge?