Who Owns Islamic Law?

The Chronicle: 2/25/2005: Who Owns Islamic Law?: "Some liberal scholars want to open the explication of sacred texts to all. Others say the path to democracy lies elsewhere."

"If all goes according to plan, Iraqi political leaders will gather this year to forge a new national constitution. It is easy to imagine many things that might shipwreck the process. Near the top of that list: Will Iraq's political forces manage to find a consensus about what role, exactly, Islam should play in the public sphere?

That question has created deep tensions within Islamic reform movements for more than a century. Certain persistent strains of Muslim thought insist that an authentically Islamic nation must enforce Shariah -- traditional religious law -- in all spheres of life, from banking to inheritance to the performing arts. Muhammad Kamaruzzaman, the assistant secretary general of an Islamist party in Bangladesh, recently wrote an essay celebrating democracy, but adding that "Islam does not accept the idea of separation of state from religion." Other Muslim activists, citing the recent unhappy history of Afghanistan and Iran, insist that lines must be drawn between mosque and state -- even if those lines do not look exactly like Western secular pluralism.

For outsiders, it is tempting to caricature this debate as a contest between Taliban-style radicals and Western-style liberals. (And there are indeed authentic representatives of both those camps in Iraq today.) But the terrain is actually far more complex than that. There are dozens of strains of traditionalist and liberal thought in the Muslim world, each looking toward different conceptions of Shariah and drawing on different elements of Islamic history and jurisprudence.

Now a few prominent liberal scholars are aggressively promoting a concept that they believe can nurture democracy and allow an authentic Islam to thrive in the modern world. Islam can regenerate itself, these scholars say, if it returns to the principle of ijtihad.

The Arabic term -- which literally means "strenuous effort" -- has historically referred to the practice of systematically interpreting Islamic religious texts in order to resolve difficult points of law. (In an oft-cited example, early Muslim jurists strove to interpret an ambiguously phrased Koranic verse about how long a divorced woman must wait before remarrying.) In the early centuries of Islam, ijtihad was confined to an elite set of scholars and jurists (mujtahidin) with rigorous training in the religion's texts and laws. Beginning around the 12th century, most Muslim communities restricted the practice even further: Some juridical schools declared outright that "the gates of ijtihad have been closed," while other regions limited the practice of ijtihad to questions of the family and everyday life."