ABSTRACT
Islamic law has never been static. Since unprecedented rapidity of innovative change is one of the most evident facts of modernity, the tenacity of traditions are equally important in the sense that religious change and variation have always been present. While a great deal of uniformity exists at the present time, none of the uncongenial legal and philosophical systems that Islamic law was faced with in premodern times can be compared to the encounter with the more or less secularised West of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The situation of Islam could no longer be settled by a few legal adjustments or reconciliary theories since in religiosis it did not deal with fairly analogous metaphysics, but with directly disruptive nonreligious scientific and philosophic trends. European notions of the modern national state and its concepts of law infected the Muslim lands, not to be ‘islamised’ on the first occasion, but to displace much of the sharʿī institutional structure. Since the tension between adherence to the traditional theory of sources and modern legal practice are not unique in any way to Islam, but are found in other legal systems as well, Alan Watson (1984) argues that the tension must be seen as indicative of a transitional stage in the development of a legal tradition rather than as deficiencies peculiar to the Islamic legal tradition.
