Islamic Law and Religion

Although the seminar's presentations were not centered around asingle issue in Islamic law, two common purposes were apparent: to explorethe nature of change in Islamic law and to understand the relationshipbetween religious authority and the practice of the law.It is useful to begin with the presentation of Abbas Amanat (YaleUniversity) on the history of modem Shi'i law, since he was the onlyspeaker who held to the characterii.ation of Islamic law (at least in modemIran) as removed from practical life, concerned with insignificant detailsof ritual, and heir to a textual tradition reduced to commentaries oncommentaries. Amanat decried the fact that the Iranian ulema missed theopportunity in the nineteenth century to refonn significantly the legal system.He argued that the success achieved by the religious scholars in instigatingthe tobacco boycott of 1891 should have mobilized them to callfor significant institutional changes in Iranian law. Yet with the end ofthe boycott, the scholars returned to the same old business of speculatingon questions irrelevant to the needs of a changing society.Amanat admitted in the question and answer period that the ulemawere restricted by political circumstances; indeed they may not have survivedto seize control of the government in our times if they had pressedfor reform too quickly. lbis is an issue that has not been explored sufficientlyin the history of Islamic law: when jurists had no direct coercivepower over governments, how did they use their moral authority to effectchange? No doubt there were always individuals who had few scruplesabout endorsing whatever the ruling elite desired, yet there were otherswho pressed for change when they calculated that such pressure could beeffective. Close biographical studies of individual scholars in their social ...