In addition, in response to domestic political pressure, several Muslim countries in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to Islamize their legal systems by amending commercial or criminal laws in order to make them more consistent with purported Islamic legal doctrine.
The fact remains, however, that the nature of the connection or relationship of any of these purportedly Islamically based or Islamized laws to the Islamic legal tradition remains debatable.
As discussed further below, even in the field of personal law, where the supremacy of Shari 'ah law was supposedly never seriously challenged, let alone the various highly politicized efforts at legal Islamization, Islamic legal doctrine was grafted onto what structurally and institutionally, as well as epistemologically, were legal systems borrowed and transplanted from the West. Practically in every Muslim country, the complex institutional structures and the processes of the Islamic legal system, especially in the 19th century, were systematically dismantled and replaced, not just by Western legal systems but, more importantly, by the legal cultures of a number of Western colonial powers. Assertions of disembodied Islamic determinations or rules in the modern age without the contextual legal processes, institutions and epistemology, and in the absence of the legal cultures that generated these determinations in the first place, meant that the relationship between contemporary manifestations of Islamic law and the classical legal tradition remained problematic. The reduction of Shari'ah law to a set of codified positivist commands enacted by a human legislative body is so at odds with the nature of the inherited classical legal tradition to point that some scholars argued that mo dern codified law is not Islamic law at all. Most notably, Wael Hallaq argued that the modern nation-state with its centralized ruling apparatus and institutions mandating human legislative supremacy is inconsistent with the very nature of Islamic law.5 According to Hallaq, the rise of the modern state with its reliance on codified law and statutory legal systems has been the virtual death knell of Islamic law.6 What Hallaq means is that classical Islamic law enjoyed a discursive and pluralistic nature. Quintessentially, the classical legal system premises itself on negotiating the relationship between the Supreme Divine legislator and the human agent. In the modern state, law is deterministic and positivistic in that obedience to the law is not premised on proof and persuasion but on sovereign command and compulsion, and thus, modern state legal systems are fundamentally inconsistent with the epistemological foundations of the classical Islamic legal system.Whether it is correct that any attempt to adopt Islamic law in the context of the modern nation-state is such an incongruent distortion that is bound to fail, remains an open question. Of course, there is no reason to assume that Islamic law cannot structurally evolve so that it can indeed adapt to the modern nation-state. Arguably, Ottoman imperial law as well as modern Iranian law are forms or types of Islamic law, although both examples exist in considerable tension with the classical tradition.7 However, there are two significant qualifications that one must note at this juncture: first, whether modern nation-state law, with its attendant centralized bureaucratic apparatus, is the ‘ruin’ of Islamic law depends on how one understands or defines the very phenomenon of law — let alone how one understands the very word Islamic. Second, as discussed below, the issue of the so-called ruin of Islamic law in the modern age assumes that the only real law is the law applied by the state. Put more directly, can Islamic law exist in the modern age outside the provenance of the state? Can Islamic law exist in the modern age as a voluntary institution and still be considered law? The answer to this brings us back again full circle to the issue of what is law, and more specifically, what kind of law is Islamic law?
More on the topic In addition, in response to domestic political pressure, several Muslim countries in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to Islamize their legal systems by amending commercial or criminal laws in order to make them more consistent with purported Islamic legal doctrine.:
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