ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to compare several competing perspectives on the Islamic legal institutions of ijtihad and taqlid. It argues that two of these extremely influential approaches carry into their analyses Western modernity’s positive valuation of reason, as an autonomous, self-authenticating episteme, coupled with a negative valuation of mimesis, as a heteronomous, historically bound means of authenticating claims to knowledge. The special issue of Islamic Law and Society was guest-edited by Professor Wael Hallaq. According to Hallaq, while it also includes a moral and a religious element, the authority of the jurist is ‘mostly epistemic’. ‘Creativity’, ‘innovativeness’ or ‘originality’ could not stand alone as self-validating criteria in Islamic law as they might as reflections of the proper use of autonomous reason in the post-Enlightenment West. Obfuscates the role of mimesis as the ultimate ground and conduit of authority that go to the core of the Islamic legal institution.