Moving from the revelation of San‘ah to the tradition offiqh, our voyage has proceeded by means of strategies of translation (Chapter 2) and comparison (Chapter 3) to discover the ‘aqd in the acoustic space of Islam.

More pre­cisely, following Bhaskar’s dialectic, Western contract law has been connected to Muslim fiqh (The Two Towers in their reciprocal coexistence) by exploring the plural itineraries of the madhahib (section 3.2) within a domain of total­ity (3L), whose different elements (such as ‘A’ and ‘B’) are always connected.

‘Totalities are systems of internally related elements or aspects. A [for us, Western contract law] may be said to be internally related to B [Muslim fiqh] if it is a... condition for the existence... of B, whether or not the converse is the case (i.e. the relation is symmetric)’ (Bhaskar, 1994, p. 75). By think­ing of the contract in the Muslim legal tradition, the Western traveller must cross a bridge of translation (section 2.5) where presence and absence coexist in mutual non-identity. If the biblical myth of Babel highlights that law exists only in the form of specific laws (see section 2.1), ‘[translation builds bridges between... [laws]... [and] permits and encourages adaptation to new cul­tural contexts and needs: it changes... [laws] as it bridges them’ (paraphras­ing Richard Ovenden in Duncan, Harrison et al., 2019, p. 7). The work of comparison allows the traveller to go across the bridge from West to East, keeping the two sides united in the process of discovery.

This point can make more explicit two fundamental corollaries of Bhaskar’s concept of totality that our search has already indirectly touched on. First, ‘all investigation has the practical character of a relational dialectic, in which the investigator is in principle part of the totality she describes’ (Bhaskar, 1994, p. 77). The original invitation made at the beginning of Chapter 1 of this book about ‘knowing ourselves’ (the famous maxim gnothi seauton, inscribed in the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo in the city of Delphi) as manifestation of a spe­cific law-religion experience is evidence of this inescapable relational dialectic.¹ Second, the description of the ‘aqd as a medium of Islamic nomos itself consti­tutes a sub-totality: when inserted in the flux of time and the variety of geo­graphical contexts where Islamic law has been applied over the centuries, fiqh texts are themselves ‘partial totalities, constituted by external as well as internal and contingent in addition to necessary relations’ (Bhaskar, 1994, p. 76).

In other words, while Chapter 3 has implicitly considered the ‘place’ of the ‘aqd as something static (as if its city could be inert in relation to the real life of human beings), the next step of our adventure consists in locating its evolution within time by contextualising fiqh literature in the dynamic flow of human events. In fact, far from being an abstract entity ‘in the books,’ the Islamic contract has always been part of the reality ‘in action’ of the Muslim world and beyond.² As its concrete performance has always been embedded in the lives of real people and practiced differently in space and time, it is in light of the changing reality of the ‘aqd that this chapter is going to address (and complete) the understanding of fiqh as ‘a conceptual replica of social life, not necessarily aspiring to be either complete or practical, but balanced between revelation, tradition and reality’ (Calder, 1996, p. 981). By locating the Islamic contract in its process of change over time, its transformation (from medieval trade to the modern law of Muslim countries and our contemporary times) will disclose how its reality has changed while maintaining elements of continuity with classical fiqh, which are re-emerging (while re-adapted) today, as we will see, in the transnational space of Islamic finance.

Of course, it is not the purpose of this chapter to provide a comprehensive account of the transformation of the ‘aqd in all the great synchronic and dia­chronic variation of contexts that it has experienced (an enterprise for which not even an entire library of social and anthropological studies would suffice). Rather, the evolution of the ‘aqd will be narrated here through some general (yet meaningful) sub-chapters - as if the Arab Girl, receiving us back after the tour of the city, were to tell us the story(-ies) of her city and its evolution; it is time, now, to listen to her.

4.1.