The problem at the heart of this book

In any journey, there are moments of peril (that are not necessarily as dan­gerous as Oedipus’s meeting with the Sphinx or Frodo’s fight against Lord Sauron) when not only is the help of fellow travellers strongly desirable but guidance from masters becomes compelling.

This problem can be clarified through five interrelated points.

First, the phrases (i) ‘Islamic contract’ and (ii) ‘contract in Islam’ are used as equivalent in this book to remark the ‘mutually constitutive relationship between Islam and Muslims’ (Ahmed, 2016, p. 543). In this sense, to the extent to which the ‘Islamic contract’ defines Islamic religion as background for Muslim orthopraxis, the ‘contract in Islam’ correspondingly entails ‘how Islam makes Muslims as Muslims make Islam’ (ibidem) in the social reality of the Muslim world.

The second point is that it is precisely in this sense that looking for the meaning of the ‘aqd can become a precious medium to understand the reli­gion of Islam: a subject that is bonne a penser for a readership beyond the circles of lawyers and comparatists, extending its hermeneutical values towards religious studies, sociology, anthropology, but also semiotics, cultural stud­ies, and media theory. For instance, if no contract law corpus exists in the Islamic legal tradition, this absence will raise in the book further questions about how to ‘place,’ ‘frame,’ and ‘map’ the ‘aqd in Muslim jurisprudence (see sections 3.1 and 3.2).

Thirdly, the attempt to understand the meaning of the Islamic contract in both its theories and practices will lead our investigation to span both Muslim intellectual² and social history. Hence, on the one hand, we will refer to the ‘aqd in Muslim jurisprudence (Chapter 3) as the product of an intellectual elite (the experts offiqh) devoted to give body (rectius, wor(l)d) to the divine Word. On the other hand, we will put legal texts in the context of a chang­ing social reality, from medieval trade to the modern state and contemporary global finance - so as to deal ‘with texts’ (cum-texts) in their own contexts (Chapter 4).

The fourth point is that, although the understanding of the ‘aqd will neces­sarily lead our attention to the literature of fiqh, this book does not implicitly subscribe to an idea of Islamic law as ‘the epitome of Islamic thought, the most typical manifestation of the Islamic way of life, the core and kernel of Islam itself’ (Schacht, 1964, p. 1).³ The experts of fiqh, in fact, have always constituted a privileged and relatively small community composed of literate people of higher lego-religious education and social authority. If the textual polity of fiqh (on the notion of textual polity, see Messick, 1989, 1993), by channelling the normative impact of the revelation, has always affected Muslim social realities, legal scholars have, themselves, been part of these social reali­ties. In this light, it is not by considering fiqh the ‘core and kernel of Islam,’ but rather, by contextualising Islamic law in the history and sociology of the Muslim world (‘from medieval trade to global finance,’ as the subtitle of this book recites) that the meaning of the ‘aqd can be fully understood in its trans­formative praxis.⁴

Last but not least, the One Ring of law-religion non-identity will raise some other fundamental issues about the way in which law and religion are thought of/conceived/imagined as spaces of social interaction in the West and the East; how visual boundaries deeply influence their construction in the former; and how these borders become less relevant (or even irrelevant) in the latter, where the divine Word makes intellectual rationales of interpretation more ‘acoustic’ than ‘visual’ by defining the human being by way of word.

In summary, in order to ‘say’ the ‘aqd correctly (see Conclusions), we need to change our way of ‘practising trade’ when dealing with Islam; the problem this book is concerned with, then, becomes how to listen to its Wor(l)d.

1.3.