Between the Islam of Orientalists and the Islam of Islamists: Wael Hallaq and a Third Debate

Abstract

This study seeks to present a complex critical vision regarding the reality of Islam through three opposing epistemic perspectives: the Orientalist discourse, which portrays Islam as a closed, unoriginal religious system; the Islamist discourse, or what is called political Islam, which imagines Islam as a system of statehood and seeks to transform the Sharia into a project of an ideological state governed by the mechanisms of modern power; and Wael Hallaq’s reading, which offers a third alternative based on Sharia as a historical, functional, moral–legal system.Thus, this paper concludes that Islam cannot be reduced either to political-ideological molds or to Orientalist representations. This conclusion is based on Hallaq’s project, which seeks to lay new foundations for the essence of Islam and Sharia, wagering that Islamic Sharia is a moral system that seeks to organize social life and produce the moral self, not merely coercive legal systems. The attempt to impose modern state models upon it inevitably produces structural, moral, and political contradictions that destroy the Sharia no less severely than the distortions practiced by Orientalism.