Law courts and fatwa councils in modern Egypt: An ethnography of Islamic legal practice

This dissertation details how, through modern litigation in the courts of Cairo, the concepts and practices of the Islamic Sharia were shaped in ways that both expressed liberal legal sensibilities and yet threatened to undermine the professedly secular ideals of the legal system. Through an ethnography of the Personal Status courts, where the Islamic Sharia is in force, it identifies mechanisms by which, paradoxically, "the religious" was constituted as a distinct and private domain even as it was incessantly rendered into an object of public, and thus political, contestation. Combining this with an ethnography of the Al-Azhar Fatwa Council, it shows how the instabilities of the secular/religious divide observed in the courts derived not from apparent contradictions between Islamic traditions and secular legal ideals, but from within the structures and forms of authority of the rule of law itself. The ethnography of the Fatwa Council further shows how daily fatwa practices, though indirectly shaped and constrained in specific ways by the modern Egyptian legal framework, nevertheless exhibit a conception of Islamic practice that, significantly, defies simple placement within the categories of "secular" or "religious" and leads to a rethinking of established understandings of legal authority. The dissertation concludes by offering two related, generalized and counterintuitive suggestions that may be relevant to an analysis of the emergence of politicized religion on both local and global scales. The first is that the secular/religious divide is inherently unstable. That is, politicized religion is not an aberration from secularism, but rather, an inextricable outcome of secular power. The second is that this instability works in favor of the state. More precisely, the instabilities commonly attributed to religious knowledges and passions, which are used to frame religion as potentially dangerous and exclude it from the state's knowledge and policy making practices, may in fact be instabilities at the core of the state itself, and integral to the consolidation of its power.