Where does the shari’a belong in the future of the Muslim state? The Arab uprisings and waves of constitutional reform in recent years have focused scholarly attention on the delicate balance to be struck between shari’a content and democratic process, rule of law and pluralism. Wael Hallaq has in recent work written against the grain of this trend, outlining a vision of the shari’a as a worldview to counter the modern nation state and its version of rule of law. An ambitious work of moral philosophy and historical critique, The Impossible State presents a systematic development of the thesis that the modern state and Islamic governance are radically incommensurable. This incommensurability is not simply a confirmation of fundamental differences between Muslims and Westerns, but a foundation for interrogating the moral vacuity of the modern project.

Here, Hallaq builds upon themes raised in his 2009 work, Shari’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations, whose project was to trace the development of the shari’a from the “synthetic legal tradition” (Shari’a, p. 18) of the Near East, through its institutional elaborations, and into its profound and catastrophic transformation through processes of modern state formation, processes that according to Hallaq brought about the “structural death” of the “shari’a episteme” (ibid., p. 15). Hallaq’s project in The Impossible State is both more wide-ranging in its coverage and more deeply critical of the modern project itself.

Among its many achievements, this book brings a detailed and impassioned exploration of key debates in Islamic law and governance into sustained conversation with canonical texts in Western political and legal theory, challenging prevailing popular and scholarly tendencies to particularize the former and universalize the latter. For Hallaq, both Islamic governance and the modern state project are products of particular historical trajectories and represent distinct and divergent political futures. He contrasts the concept of rule of law in the nation state and Islamic governance, arguing that the supremacy of the shari’a in the Islamic paradigm privileges a ““thick” conception of rule of law” (p. 72) over the state. Rather than seeing the modern state as a politically neutral form that might contain a plethora of religious and moral content, he argues that two developments in the modern state project, “the rise of the legal” and the “rise of the political” (p. 75), effectively evacuated the modern state of the moral and ethical content necessary to Islamic governance. Further, the modern state and Islamic governance are productive of different disciplines and subjectivities: “homo modernus” (p. 104) and “homo moralis” (p. 138). These three differences alone spell the impossibility of an Islamic state as a variant of the modern nation state, but to drive the point home further, Hallaq argues that the contemporary global and capitalist order itself is inimical to the establishment and maintenance of a viable Islamic state.

The violent historical encounter between the modern state project and Islamic governance provides the central drama of Hallaq’s argument, but the book’s characterization of this encounter also raises some problematic issues. The author theorizes the encounter between Muslims and the modern state in terms that locate agency unequivocally in the hands of the modern West: “Modernity, whose hegemonic discourse is determined by the institutions and intellectuals of the powerful modern West, has not offered a fair shake to two-thirds of the world’s population who have lost their history and, with it, their organic ways of existence” (pp. 3–4). Contemporary Muslims face a “dissonance between their moral and cultural aspirations…and the moral realities of the modern world… realities with which they must live but that were not of their own making” (p. 3).

Hallaq’s commitment to moral resources as a path forward would seem to have less potential if modernity is hegemonic and agency has been denied to Muslims. Fortunately, it is unclear whether the Muslim commitment to the modern nation state is now, or has ever been, as whole-hearted as Hallaq assumes (p. 75). The acceptance of the state model in modern Islamic political and legal thought might be read more often than not as a vehicle for Muslim political aspirations, and the relationship between Muslims and the modern state as one of continual struggle rather than hegemony. The dissonance that Hallaq finds between Muslim aspirations and modern realities has functioned as a point of departure for a wide range of modern Islamic thought and Muslim politics, but such is the force of modernity for Hallaq, that the contrast can only properly be made between premodern Islam and the modern state.

Some critiques of Hallaq’s recent work revolve around his tendency to contrast Islam and the shari’a in their ideal formulations with the historical experience of the modern state. Hallaq argues that the purpose of focusing on the “paradigm” of Islamic governance is not to deny its workings in the world, but to seek to understand how “paradigmatic discourses and practices…[persisted] in the continual re-creation of a particular order” (p. 11). At times, the distinction between legal theory and historical experience remains unclear – as in the discussion of separation of powers in the modern state (pp. 38–48), when the target of Hallaq’s critique is the Euro-American state, the United States, and/or the nation-state, its legal theory, its institutional makeup, and/or its empirical failings. This slippage makes it hard to evaluate the comparative bases of some of Hallaq’s claims about Islamic governance, adjudication and society, particularly when it is likewise unclear when Hallaq refers to the theoretical logic of Islamic institutions, and when to their workings in pre-modern Muslim societies (pp. 52–58). Rather than simply marking divergences between paradigms, the key concepts Hallaq raises as points of comparison—separation of powers, sovereignty, authority, subjectivity—each also mark critical lines of tension between paradigm and history. Perhaps the more pressing analytic question might therefore be how the internal resources of Islamic governance function to ameliorate these tensions, and here a sense of Muslim engagements with the dissonance between their experience and aspirations, in diverse times and places, might have provided further clarity.

This reading of the relationship between paradigm and history could also work to strengthen what may be the book’s seminal contribution to both Islamic and Western legal and political theory: its vision of how law might be theorized beyond modernity and the nation state. Hallaq puts forward a vision of law embedded in an episteme, a cosmology, and a praxis. In the modern project, law is the expression of sovereign will, and this sovereignty is theorized as popular sovereignty but exercised by a godlike state, without which the law is unimaginable and unintelligible (pp. 29–34). The development of modern legality in conjunction with the state has further exacerbated the disengagement of law from morality and society (p. 83). He argues that the unity between the modern state and law “does not meet the standards of Islamic governance”(p. 38); “in the shari’a, the legal is the instrument of the moral, not the other way around” (p. 10). When the moral is taken as the “central domain” (p. 7), a renewed understanding of law and its potential emerges, law as integral to the project of moral governance, “attentive to the spiritual-moral self, to family and community, to economic equitability, and…to the environment” (p. 198, n. 99).

In the paradigm of Islamic governance, the paramount activity is striving (literally, “jihad”; p. 11) towards the moral, a “foundational and structural impulse…[to] discover God’s moral will.” From this, the legal methodology of ijtihad follows, a process that yields law that is “inherently multiple and probabilistic” (p. 58), a rule of law to which all actors in the state are subservient. This vision of “highly meaningful rule of law” (p. 74), a worked in combination with legal actors and institutions embedded in local civil society, and depended upon willing individual submission to the law, cultivated by performative and affective acts (p. 118). When contrasted with that of the modern state, Hallaq argues, “Islamic governance emerges…as a distinctly more favorable expression of just and democratic rule” (p. 74).

The book makes a further contribution to religion and politics scholarship by historicizing the commonly made distinction between the ritual and ethico-legal elements of Islam. Hallaq makes the key point that categorical divisions between ibadat (“religious works”; p. 216) and mu’amalat [“laws and transactions…between people”; p. 217) reinscribe a false (Enlightenment) dichotomy between the ritual and the legal elements of the shari’a. This false dichotomy has fueled an understanding of the shari’a as a system lacking in efficacy and incapable of enforcement—and therefore in need of colonial and national state interventions. Scholarship on “Islamic law,” a category that itself derived from assumptions about the divisibility of law from other domains of life and governance, often replicates these assumptions (p. 113). The sections that elaborate the relationship between ibadat and mu’amalat as mutually constitutive components in the shari’a system have a grace and coherence that themselves go much of the way to communicating—stylistically and substantively—the gap between modern state law and the moral law of the shari’a, not just as varieties of legal logic, but as ways of being in the world (pp. 118–135). Here, Hallaq makes a tantalizing case for understanding the shari’a as a “field of practical mysticism” (p. 137), making Islamic governance not merely a system of law and morality, but a unified worldview and pragmatic field “that did not distinguish…between the meanings of the legal, the moral and the mystical” (p. 138).

The Impossible State makes an important theoretical contribution to both Islamic legal studies and contemporary critiques of the modern project. For scholars of religion, politics and law, Hallaq presents a challenge to think about law not merely as an outcome of politics, but as critically constitutive and generative of political thought, institutions and repertoires. At a time when the futures of many Muslim states are in flux, this work makes a provocative case for the depth and potential of “Islamic moral resources” (p. 13) to show the way forward, even as it argues that “[f]or Muslims today to seek the adoption of the modern state system…is to bargain for a deal inferior to the one they secured for themselves over the centuries of their history” (p. 72).