Shari’a in the Modern Era Muslim Minorities Jurisprudence By Iyad Zahalka (trans. Ohad Stadler and Cecilia Sibony) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 224 pages.)

Abstract

Iyad Zahalka’s commendable Shari’a in the Modern Era: Muslim Minorities
Jurisprudence gives researchers and legal practitioners an overview of the
emerging fiqh al-aqalliyyāt (the jurisprudence of minorities) discipline. In
fact, at the time of its publication several other books were published on this
subject, among them Uriya Shavit’s Shari’a and Muslim Minorities: The
Wasati and Salafi Approaches to Fiqh al-Aqalliyyāt al-Muslima (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015) and Said Fares Hassan’s Fiqh al-Aqalliyyāt: History,
Development, and Progress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
114 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:1
Zahalka credits Shavit with giving him useful comments while preparing
Shari’ah in the Modern Era.
It is no coincidence that all of these books are from a Sunni perspective
with particular focus on the works of two well-known scholars in the Sunni
legal world: Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Taha Jabir al-Alwani (d. 2016). Zahalka’s
book, therefore, captures the gradual creation of another – or perhaps a new
– branch of fiqh that focuses on the socio-legal issues faced by Muslims ruled
by non-Muslim sovereigns or systems that conflict with Islamic law. His objective
is to examine the “fiqh al-aqalliyyāt of the wasaṭi faction, a school of
thought dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood that positions itself in the middle
ground between conservative resistance to changing religious laws and
the disintegration of the commitment to religious tradition” (p. 4). The author ...