Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning Encountering Our Legal Other By Anver M. Emon, ed. (London: Oneworld, 2016. 273 pages.)

Abstract

This book comes at a very advantageous time, for interfaith encounters have
become part of a larger conversation in academic and non-academic circles.
Journals and conferences have added the dimension of how to understand the
“other” and create dialogue in many innovative ways. Islamic and Jewish
Legal Reasoning: Encountering Our Legal Other is precisely the type of text
and rigorous academic guide to lead us at a time when so many religious laws
are misunderstood – especially between Jews and Muslims.
The authors ask some questions: “Can the traditions of Judaism and Islam
be read together through a legal religious lens without always having a common
ground?” and “Can dialogue precipitate a philosophical framework that
can demonstrate self-critical thought and still be engaged with the ‘Other’?”
More importantly, in each section ask the authors some core questions about
religion and law in order to show why the modern preoccupation with religious
law is so relevant. In addition, through their methodological legal analysis,
they at times demonstrate why religious law is irrelevant. The scholars
featured this book are meticulous, thought-provoking, and timely in terms of
their significant lines of questioning.
The book is unique in its conception, for Anver M. Emon and the contributors’
organic approach makes it more accessible and, at the same time, academically
rigorous. The book emerged from workshops and was “developed
further when Emon went to Cambridge University to join Gibbs and others in
the Scriptural Reasoning project, where scholars read the scriptural texts of
multiple traditions with scholars from those different traditions” (p. xi). Scriptural
reasoning allows one to read another’s scriptures in a way that allows for
personal readings and reactions to one another’s sacred text, an approach that
allows for “recognizing their own otherness to their own respective traditions”
(p. xxiii).
Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning opens up deeply complex and glaring
issues of interpretation, authority of interpretation, and the historical conditions
of reading sacred text, especially for religious law. In the first chapter,
“Assuming Power: Judges, Imagined Authorities, and the Quotidian,” Rumee
Ahmed and Aryeh Cohen introduce us to this complex problem of authority
and complex phenomenon through legal schools of thought in both traditions.
The question of God as authority is crucial, as the authors ask, almost in a ...