What Is the Sharia?

• Author: Ismailee, Sania
• Position: Book review

What Is the Sharia?

By Baudouin Dupret

London: Hurst & Company, 2018, 248 pages, $50.00, ISBN: 9781849048170

Relevant to contemporary times when Sharia, generally referred to as Islamic law, has been associated with numerous negative connotations -ranging from anti-women, homophobic and cruel- Baudouin Duprets What is the Sharia? is a timely treatise which offers clarification of sharia as a concept. Instead of providing a historical analysis of the development of various schools of Islamic jurisprudence and a detailed evaluation around contested themes like Islamic finance, the criminal justice system, or Islamic family law, Du-pret adopts a methodology and style of argumentation similar to Shahab Ahmad's What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. (1) By focusing on the historical and contingent nature of sharia, the book presents the contribution of concrete contexts in the shaping of divine law (sharia). Dupret writes that the meaning and significance of Islam and Sharia "vary in space and time" (p. 4). Thus, they are "capable of evolution" (p. 1), contrary to the dominant perceptions about their stagnant nature.

The book addresses two major concerns with a total of ten chapters built around the theme of sharia. While the first six chapters provide a detailed analysis of the concept of sharia and sources of Islamic law, the last four chapters comment on its significance in contemporary times. One of the most intriguing characteristics of the book is Dupret's invocation of Wittgenstein's concept of "language-games" (p. 8) to explain sharia (although he doesn't acknowledge Wittgenstein). In line with later Wittgenstein, Dupret cautions against an essentialist understanding of the contested term sharia and proposes that its meaning lies in its "use" (p. 19), that is, its context. This implies that there is no necessary connection between sharia and legal rulings. Sharia assumes a legal sense only under certain circumstances, where it is referred as Islamic law. Therefore, Dupret prioritizes a "practice-based approach" (p. 22) over an essentialist approach in the first chapter to grasp the concept of sharia. He criticizes Wael B. Hallaq's Sharia: Theory, Practice, Transformations (2) for its flawed approach of treating sharia as a fixed entity.

Chapters two, three and four discuss the four sources of Islamic law -the Quran, Hadith (Sunna), consensus (ijma), and analogical reasoning (qiyas)- and the comments of Islamic scholars on the...