Jurisprudence, authority, and the modern state

Dissertation and monograph

The Islamic State Between Utopia and Submission

Taḥqīq al-Manāṭ as a Jurisprudential Methodology for Islamic Political Reasoning

The dissertation studies how Muslim political reasoning changes when inherited jurisprudential categories encounter the institutions and coercive capacities of the modern state. Its central analytic is taḥqīq al-manāṭ: the jurist’s disciplined identification of whether, where, and how the operative rationale of a rule is present in a particular case.

Read as a methodology rather than a narrow technical device, taḥqīq al-manāṭ provides a bridge between classical jurisprudence and political judgment. It directs attention to context, institutional form, and the factual conditions under which scriptural and legal claims are applied. The project uses this lens to examine the relationship among authority, obedience, justice, and the imagined Islamic state.

The resulting monograph project asks how Islamic political thought can remain normatively serious without treating either the premodern polity or the contemporary nation-state as a timeless model.

Committee: Asma Afsaruddin (chair), William E. Scheuerman, Nader Morkus, Ovamir Anjum, and Ibrahim Gemeah.