Facts, Values, Institutions: Notes on Contemporary Islamic Legal Debate

Since the 1990s, an increasingly diverse set of Muslim scholars and institutions has called for the integration of social science into the system of Islamic normativity. This article explores some historical and conceptual issues raised by this call. It approaches the issue through an examination of one of its central concepts: the notion of fiqh al-wāqi‘ (the fiqh of reality or realistic fiqh). The article traces this concept’s distinctively modern history, situating it in the context of various projects of religious reform and in relation to specific anxieties regarding the nature of modern law. Taking a set of controversies related to Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s fatwas on Muslim minorities as a case-study, it then argues that the concept of a “realistic fiqh” renders visible not only the difficulties that social scientific inquiry presents to the hermeneutical commitments of the Islamic legal tradition, but also the challenges that the layered structure of reality in the Islamic tradition poses to the sociological imagination. In conclusion, this paper briefly addresses two implications of the Islamic legal debates discussed previously: the question of the political and the limits of methodological individualism. It also suggests that contemporary Islamic legal scholars who struggle with these questions may be laying the ground for the development of a critical Islamic jurisprudence centrally concerned with the articulation of facts, values, and institutions.