توضیح

یادداشت: عنوان فارسی: شریعت و دولت در خاورمیانه مدرن مسلمان.
The Islamic sharia is central to Islam in the minds of most Muslims and non-Muslim scholars. In many ways, the centrality of the Islamic sharia has increased in recent decades. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this centrality, the precise, even the general, role of the sharia in Islamic societies is the subject of contentious debate among Muslims. Outside of and underlying such debates are more subtle and rarely articulated differences about the meaning of the Islamic sharia. In this essay, I will put forward a general intellectual map for those varying meanings. More critically, I will suggest that important shifts in the meaning of the Islamic sharia have taken place in the Muslim world, and that these shifts are closely connected to the nature and viability of legal and educational institutions associated with the Islamic sharia in the past. As the Islamic sharia has become disconnected from these institutions, its meaning has changed in some fundamental ways. Most important, the sharia is approached less for its process than for its content. And because the shift in institutions and understanding has received much less attention from Muslims, widespread attempts to re-create older relationships (particularly involving the relationship between the Islamic sharia and the state) in fact involve a deepening rather than a counteracting of the transformation in the Islamic sharia.