Islamic Legal Reform or Re-formation? The Transmutations of Critique in Rumee Ahmed’s Sharia Compliant: A User’s Guide to Hacking Islamic Law

To say that the issue of Islamic legal reform is on the minds of most scholars and students (Muslim or otherwise) of Islamic law is hardly an exaggeration. But what does reform look like? Rumee Ahmed engages the issue in his recent book, Sharia Compliant: A User’s Guide to Hacking Islamic Law. Intended for a broad audience and aimed at catalyzing legal change from the bottom up, Sharia Compliant attempts to demystify Islamic jurisprudence and provide a blueprint for lawmaking, or “hacking” Islamic law, through reverse-engineering. In the process of his critique of Islamic law, Ahmed revises its history and method. This review argues that in lieu of reform, Ahmed argues for re-forming Islamic law. The hyphen is meant to indicate that Ahmed’s proposal amounts to a transmutation of fiqh and uṣūl al-fiqh: Islamic law is not interpreted, but arbitrarily willed; its sources (the Qur’an and Sunna), ornaments of this will, are instrumentalized to serve any desired end. In the end, Ahmed’s re-formed system undermines his hope for a democratic process of lawmaking.