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 THE
IMPOSSIBLE
S TAT E

Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament

Wael B. Hallaq

Columbia University Press

New York

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 Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
[Link]
Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved

COVER DESIGN: Martin Hinze

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hallaq, Wael B., 1955–

The impossible state : islam, politics, and modernity’s moral
predicament / Wael B. Hallaq.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-16256-2 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53086-6 (e-book)
1. Islam and state. 2. Islam and politics. I. Title.
BP173.6.H29 2013
297.2′72—dc23
2012014567

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither
the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired
or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

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 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction ix

1 Premises 1

2 The Modern State 19

3 Separation of Powers: Rule of Law or Rule of the State? 37

4 The Legal, the Political, and the Moral 74

5 The Political Subject and Moral Technologies of the Self 98

6 Beleaguering Globalization and Moral Economy 139

7 The Central Domain of the Moral 155

Notes 171

Glossary of Key Terms 215

Bibliography 221

Index 245

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[Link] vi 8/29/12 12:04 PM
 Preface and Acknowledgments

Although the greater part of this book was written during 2011, it has
been in the making for at least a decade. It formed part of the prepara-
tion necessary to write my Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations,
published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. The plan and struc-
ture of Sharīʿa did not allow for a full, or at least fuller, statement about
the modern state and the reasons for and meanings of its incompat-
ibility with the Sharīʿa. The present book may therefore be regarded as
a continuation of and expansion upon Sharīʿa’s interest in the state, in
both empirical substance and theoretical direction. In terms of substance,
it is clear that much more needed to be said about the modern state in
the 2009 book that could not be included in an already very long work.
In terms of direction—by which I mean teasing out the wider theoreti-
cal implications of the empirical narrative of so-called Islamic law and
its governance—Sharīʿa was largely silent. The present work attempts
to fill this gap and in the process engage the Western disciplines of po-
litical science, moral philosophy, and law.
In thinking about the themes of this book, I have benefited from the
intellectual companionship of a number of individuals. My graduate
students and former colleagues at McGill University have for years af-
forded me the luxury of engagement in first-rate conversations about the
modern state and much else. At Columbia, my department’s fortnightly

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 colloquium and other extensive conversations with colleagues have
continued this engagement, providing me with much insight that re-
sulted in sharpening the text. I am grateful to Talal Asad’s and Sudipta
Kaviraj’s always fruitful intellectual companionship; to Akeel Bilgrami
and Kaoukab Chebaro for insightful remarks they made on the second
part of chapter 5; to Mahmood Mamdani’s observations on chapter 3;
to Abed Awad’s useful critique of the entire manuscript, but most es-
pecially of chapter 3, which benefited greatly from his comments; and
last but certainly not least to Muhammad Qasim Zaman, for reading
and perspicaciously and constructively commenting on the entire text.
I am also grateful to my gifted and efficient research assistants:
Maura Donovan, Shawn Higgins, Aelfie Starr Tuff, and Elizabeth Rghebi.
Stephen Millier of McGill continues to make what I write appear more
elegant. To all these individuals and to others I may have neglected to
mention, I record here my profound gratitude.

P R E FAC E A N D AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S
viii

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 Introduction

The argument of this book is fairly simple: The “Islamic state,” judged
by any standard definition of what the modern state represents,1 is both
an impossibility and a contradiction in terms.
Until the early nineteenth century, and for twelve centuries before
then, the moral law of Islam, the Sharīʿa, had successfully negotiated
customary law and local customary practices and had emerged as the
supreme moral and legal force regulating both society and government.
This “law” was paradigmatic, having been accepted as a central system
of high and general norms by societies and the dynastic powers that
ruled over them. It was a moral law that created and maintained a
“well-ordered society,” to borrow John Rawls’s effective expression.2
However, beginning in the nineteenth century, and at the hands of co-
lonialist Europe, the socioeconomic and political system regulated by
the Sharīʿa was structurally dismantled, which is to say that the Sharīʿa
itself was eviscerated, reduced to providing no more than the raw ma-
terials for the legislation of personal status by the modern state.3 Even
in this relatively limited sphere, the Sharīʿa lost its autonomy and social
agency in favor of the modern state; Sharīʿa was henceforth needed
only to the limited extent that deriving certain provisions from it—
provisions that were reworked and re-created according to modern
expediency—legitimized the state’s legislative ventures.

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 For the great majority of Muslims today, the Sharīʿa undoubtedly
remains a source of religious and moral authority. Whereas some “Is-
lamic” regimes have adopted the policy of distilling from the Sharīʿa—
while flagrantly disregarding both its procedural laws and communal
context—such punishments as dismemberment and stoning,4 the aver-
age Muslim individual continues to find in the Sharīʿa a spiritual re-
source, a connection with God, and a way to discipline the inner self—
what we discuss later under the rubric of technologies of the self.5 To
say that the overwhelming majority of modern Muslims wish for the
Sharīʿa to return in one form or another is to state what anyone with
even a cursory knowledge of world affairs would readily acknowledge.
The question of why they entertain this wish will be answered in good
part in the following chapters, although this is not an intended objec-
tive of this book.
Yet, as located in the modern condition, this wish entails an aporia.
Muslims today, including their leading intellectuals, have come to take
the modern state for granted, accepting it as a natural reality. They
often assume it not only to have existed throughout the long course
of their history but also to have been sanctioned by no less an author-
ity than the Qurʾān itself.6 Even nationalism, an unprecedented phe-
nomenon and one uniquely constitutive of the modern state, is said to
have been “launched into the world by the Islamic Holy Constitution”
similarly drafted in Medina fourteen centuries ago.7 Early Islamic so-
cieties are also viewed as having developed the concepts of citizen-
ship, democracy, and suffrage.8 Unlike some globalization theorists and
political scientists who call into question the future durability of the
state, modern Islamist thinkers and scholars9 take the modern state for
granted and, in effect, as a timeless phenomenon,10 this being partly a
reflection of a present reality in which they must confront what seems
to them to be an indestructible and powerful machine on a daily basis.
Modern Muslims are therefore faced with the challenge of reconcil-
ing two facts: first, the ontological fact of the state and its undeniably
powerful presence, and, second, the deontological fact of the necessity
to bring about a form of Sharīʿa governance. This challenge is further
complicated by the recognition that the state in Muslim countries has
not done much to rehabilitate any acceptable form of genuine Sharīʿa
governance. The constitutional battles of the Islamists in Egypt and
Pakistan, the failures of the Iranian Revolution as an Islamic political
and legal project, and other similar disappointments amply testify to

INTRODUCTION
x

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 this proposition.11 Yet the state remains the favored template of the Is-
lamists and the ulama (so-called Muslim clergymen).12 In a recent and
highly representative statement, the powerful Muslim Brothers argue
that the modern nation-state

does not stand in contradiction with the implementation of Islamic

Sharīʿa, because Islam is the highest authority in Muslim lands,
or so it should be. With its mechanisms, regulations, laws, and
systems, the modern state—if it contains no contradiction to the
founding and indubitable principles of Islam—does not preclude
the possibility of being developed . . . [so that] we can benefit from
it in achieving for ourselves progress and advancement.13

Note that “developed” here should be taken to mean “adapted to our

needs and purposes,” as the text makes clear later. Any attempt by the
nation-state to quarantine religion or undermine commitment to the
supreme authority of Islam will no doubt “be rejected by any Muslim.”
Thus, the state is expected to promote Islamic values, including general
public interest, the rule of law, freedom and equal opportunity for all
citizens, and to “deepen the conception of citizenship. . . . In our un-
derstanding of what Islam means, these are [the tasks] that the modern
state should accomplish.” A subtitle in the document sums it up: “There
is no Contradiction between the Nation-State and Islamic Sharīʿa.”14
But surely there is. The argument of this book, as we have already
intimated, is that any conception of a modern Islamic state is inherently
self-contradictory.15 We must remember that Muslims today constitute
nearly one-fifth of the world’s population and that inasmuch as they
live in modernity, they also live the modern project. They are as much a
part of this project as anyone else. It is the argument of this book that
the inherent self-contradictions entailed by a modern Islamic state are
primarily grounded in modernity’s moral predicament. The political
and the economic, however integral to this self-contradiction, remain
derivative of this moral predicament, which is to say that resolving
these contradictions as moral issues would by definition resolve the
political and economic problems. To state the matter even more explic-
itly, the inherent contradictions of any conception of a modern Muslim
state—by virtue of the formidable vertical effect and horizontal power
of the modern state—capture not only the entire spectrum of what has
been described as the “crisis of modern Islam” but also implicate the

INTRODUCTION
xi

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 moral dimensions of the modern project in our world from beginning
to end. This book, therefore, is an essay in moral thought even more so
than it is a commentary on politics or law.
In order to elaborate our argument, we must first arrive at descrip-
tions of what we shall call “paradigmatic Islamic governance” and the
“paradigmatic modern state,” these being the preoccupation of chap-
ters 1 and 2, respectively. However, chapter 1 also delineates the con-
ception of “paradigm” as we use it here, a conception central to our
overall argument. And since this argument will fly in the face of many
modernist assumptions about law, politics, morality, and the meaning
of the good life, we must also address the ideology inhabiting—nay,
dominating—our thinking about modernity and the achievements of
the modern project. We must therefore call into question the latent and
not so latent conceptual assumptions undergirding modern discourse,
namely, the rhetorical and substantive discourse of the modern theory
of progress. On the other hand, while recognizing synchronic changes
and diachronic variants in the makeup of the modern state, chapter 2
attempts to identify what we will call form-properties that, for our pur-
poses, represent the essential qualities of this state.
Interdependent in their constitution and effects, these form-prop-
erties will be disentangled for analytical purposes. The ideas of sover-
eign will and the rule of law will be examined in chapter 3 in terms of
the doctrine and practice of separation of powers, an examination that
serves two purposes. First, it will allow us to set forth the constitutional
frameworks and structures of both the modern state and Islamic gov-
ernance, since these are the larger contexts in which law, the legal sys-
tem, government, and politics are deemed to operate. In other words,
this will serve to outline the constitutional backgrounds and boundar-
ies of the two systems. The second and simultaneous purpose, on the
other hand, will be to highlight the constitutional differences between
these two systems of governance, differences that will permit a further
exploration, in chapter 4, of the meaning of law and its relationship to
morality. This largely philosophical account, underscoring the qualita-
tive differences between the legal conception of the modern state and
that of Islamic governance, will turn political in the second part of the
chapter. Here, the legal-moral differentials identified in the first part
will be augmented by political differentials that will reveal yet another
sphere of incompatibility.
Chapter 5 narrows the focus of chapter 4, moving from the macro-
to the microlevels, from systems of thought and of politics to the realms

INTRODUCTION
xii

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 of self and subjectivity. Chapter 5 argues that the modern nation-state
and Islamic governance tend to produce (by their very nature and
by virtue of the technologies of the self that both inherently possess)
two different fields of subjectivity formation. Again, the subjects pro-
duced by these paradigmatic fields stand at great variance with each
other, engendering two different types of moral, political, epistemic,
and psychosocial conceptions of the world. These profound differences
between the subjects of the modern nation-state and those of Islamic
governance merely represent the microcosmic manifestations of the
macrocosmic differences that are material, structural, constitutional,
and, just as importantly, philosophical and conceptual.
In chapter 6 we concede, for the sake of argument, that against all
odds and despite staggering impediments, a form of Islamic governance
comes into existence. We then argue that modern forms of globalization
and the position of the state in the ever increasing intensity of these
forms are sufficient to render any brand of Islamic governance either
impossible or, if possible, incapable of survival in the long run. How-
ever, the aggregate implications of this and earlier arguments in the
foregoing chapters are clear: all things considered, Islamic governance
is unsustainable, given the conditions prevailing in the modern world.
Capitalizing on the concept of paradigm and central domain, we
move in the final chapter to the interrogation of modern moral dilem-
mas, pointing to their structural conceptual foundations as constituting
the root of the moral predicaments that modernity, in all its Eastern
and Western forms, has been encountering. We insist that if the impos-
sibility of Islamic governance in the modern world is directly the result
of the lack of an auspicious moral environment that can meet the mini-
mal standards and expectations of this governance, then it is imperative
to connect this morally based impossibility with the wider problematic
contexts that modernity’s moral difficulties have engendered. Hence,
we argue that this impossibility is merely another manifestation—and
a constant companion—of a number of other problems, not the least
of which is the increasing collapse of organic social units, the rise of
oppressive economic forms, and, most importantly, the havoc wrought
against the natural habitat and the environment. All these are seen in
this book as philosophical-moral and epistemic issues as much as they
are material and physical. Indeed, looking closely at the internal moral
critiques within Western postmodernity, we find close parallels, even a
virtual identity, between them and the latent meanings of the modern
Muslim call for the establishment of Islamic governance.

INTRODUCTION
xiii

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