Is there a way to think about contemporary life with knowledge that is neither modern nor Western? Rather than confining Islam to a “religion” and shariʿa to its “law,” Youssef Belal provocatively argues that Islamic shariʿa is a mode of knowledge with its own concepts and scholarly categories through which the world and the self are grasped. The Life of Shariʿa considers two intertwined lineages: how Islamic scholars have formulated knowledge from the classical period to today and how Westerners have understood the law and its origins. By melding these two traditions, Belal puts the formation of modern law under a new light and offers, through a compelling conceptualization of shariʿa, a powerful argument for its continued relevance to the life of contemporary Muslims.
Youssef Belal is an anthropologist and political theorist. He is also a UN diplomat and peace mediator who served as political director of UN missions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, and was named a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in 2016. He is author of Le cheikh et le calife: Sociologie religieuse de l’Islam politique au Maroc (The sheikh and the caliph: Religious sociology of political Islam in Morocco).
"Our lives are ruled by law. But what if law were life? What if it were the knowledge, the ordering of knowledges, necessary to live? Every law? Shari’a, Youssef Belal demonstrates, is in fragments, but these fragments are remarkable pathways to self and other, lives known and unknown, worlds visible and invisible. A phenomenal achievement." —Gil Anidjar, author of The Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal
"The first truly comparative and conceptually sophisticated study of Islamic law, Belal's book exits the closed world of so much Islamic scholarship to embed his subject in a world of unexpected connections as well as contrasts." —Faisal Devji, Professor of History at Oxford University
“This remarkable and multi-faceted study of Shari’a—which looks at its episteme, ethics, politics, and complex relation between inner and outer worlds—is a breathtaking work of scholarship that offers a new genealogy of Western law through the perspective of Shari’a. It delivers a philosophical challenge to reconsider the living relation between forms of knowledge and modes of ethical life concerning law and politics.
Engaging a wide range of debates within Islamic jurisprudence, history, and philosophy, as well as an array of modern critical and political thinkers, Belal shows us the entanglements that constitute our complex modernity. Marking the continuing effects of colonial power on thought and politics, Belal reverses the gaze by rewriting Western political theory from the perspective of its discarded Other. He undertakes this project with impressive erudition and conceptual patience.
This book shifts our conceptual and embodied understanding of law, the possibility of plural and co-existing legal epistemes, the revolutionary constellations they produce, and the new public spheres that reflect this complexity. It leaves the nonspecialist more educated than before and illuminates a structural ignorance within which Western thought has been living for too long. And it opens up an ethical vision that links the seen and unseen worlds to an ethics in and of the public sphere.”—Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind
374 pp.6 x 9
9780520410039$34.95|£30.00Paper
May 2025