Vital Interests: Thanks for participating in the Vital Interests forum. You've written an insightful new book Shari‘a, Inshallah. This is an important work as it provides a unique understanding of the inter-relationship of religion, politics, and law in Islamic societies. 

A significant aspect of Muslim life is the role of shari‘a – a concept we hear about in ambiguous and often pejorative ways. To start our conversation, can you give us some background on what shari‘a is, how it evolved in Islam and how it came to be what it is today?

Mark Massoud: The word shari‘a is an Arabic word meaning “path” or “way”. It is not a kind of state “law” as we think of law in Western countries or Western political theory. It's more of an ethical guide for people's behavior – how people are supposed to interact with and respect themselves, other people, the environment, and protect their worship of God.

There are a number of sources of shari‘a, and Islamic scholars disagree as to some of them, but they do agree on two primary sources. One is the Quran, which is Islam's holy book. The other one is the Hadith, a compilation of Prophet Mohammad's statements, actions, and tacit approvals during his lifetime.

So shari‘a is a combination of divine verses -- received from God -- and the life and teachings of the Prophet Mohammad. Those two sources have been interpreted for centuries by Muslim jurists who have disagreed on almost every single matter relating to how to interpret those sources and how to fit them into contemporary contexts. That's created what I would call Islamic law – all those various human interpretations of shari‘a over the centuries. 

VI: When Islamic rulers spread their influence across Africa and the Middle East and then into Spain, did the experience of administering these diverse societies contribute to shari‘a becoming a model for religious and political control?

Mark Massoud: Yes, definitely. Early administrative states that emerged throughout northern Africa brought with them different ideas of how societies ought to be organized and run, and shari‘a was a big part of that. In areas where most people were Muslims, piety meant seeing shari‘a as the source code of good behavior in financial transactions, in personal relationships, and in the distribution, inheritance, and exchange of property. Shari‘a came with them through all of that.

That said, again, Muslim jurists in various places interpreted shari‘a in different ways. There were always connections and layers between shari‘a and what had already existed in those places. Shari‘a itself was being transformed – or not shari‘a, but rather interpretations of shari‘a were being transformed as Muslims moved, as Islamic empires expanded.

VI: Were there Islamic scholars based in academies in North Africa, in the Middle East, or even in Spain, who were of particular influence in their interpretations of the role of shari‘a?

Mark Massoud: Yes, many indeed. In present day Iraq, Iran, throughout North Africa, into Southern Europe, many different scholars interpreted shari‘a for their local communities. Those scholars – in Arabic, they're called muhaditheen – are interpreters of shari‘a. There's a branch of Islamic legal philosophy called Usul al-Fiqh, sources of shari‘a. One can spend their whole life studying the sources of shari‘a, the interpreters of shari‘a and whether or not they were reliable during a particular time when they're making a specific interpretation. Interpreters today explain their lineage – who were their teachers, who were their teachers’ teachers, and so on.

These are the connections from which many Muslim jurists today, for instance at universities in Egypt, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia, trace their intellectual lineage - to almost the time of the Prophet Mohammad.

VI: In the major schism that happened in Islam, between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and other groups like the Sufis, how does shari‘a differ within those schisms?

Mark Massoud: Theological schisms started pretty early on over who were meant to be the original successors after the death of the Prophet Mohammad. 

Estimates suggest 85% of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are Sunni, with Shia followers more common in Iraq and Iran. There are some significant theological differences, but there are also differences in terms of schools of law and how to interpret the law. Even in Sunni law, there are differences.

In Sunni Islamic law, there were dozens of schools of thought, depending on specific teachers and who followed those teachers and how long their ideas and their interpretations endured. Those schools coalesced into the four remaining today in Sunni Islamic law – Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki, and Shafi‘i.

VI: In Sunni countries, would the jurisprudence of all courts be based on shari‘a?

Mark Massoud: Yes. If not in name, then certainly in practice because no one would want to be seen as violating shari‘a. The idea is, of course, what those courts will be doing will be consistent with people's understanding of shari‘a, or at least the courts will claim that what they are doing is consistent with shari‘a.

VI: Within the Sunni world religious schools, madrasas, created and supported by Saudi Arabia, disseminate a traditional, some would say reactionary, Salafi or  Wahhabi teaching of Islam. How does this impact the interpretation of shari‘a? 

Mark Massoud: At least from my research in the Horn of Africa, this has been a recent development from the last few decades. Islam is nearly 15 centuries old, but there's been this radical political change over the last few decades where being trained in a certain worldview by certain teachers in what's present-day Saudi Arabia has a kind of credibility, especially for many young people. That's often a conservative credibility linked to a certain view of Islam that I think many progressive Muslims would see as more conservative.

I saw this generational divide when meeting religious leaders during my own fieldwork in the Horn of Africa, where some of the older religious leaders seemed more progressive than the younger ones. It’s really important to understand both within Muslim communities, but also for people who are non-Muslims, to understand that many differences are not just theological, they're also generational.

VI: If the Saudi Salafi/Wahhabi tradition is considered the ultra-conservative norm in Islam, is there a country or approach which represents a progressive interpretation of shari‘a?

Mark Massoud: I think those interpretations also exist everywhere. If there is a progressive movement in Islam, it's not a single one. I met Muslim feminists who were reclaiming shari‘a to get women out to vote, to get women to stand for election, to promote girls in sports, and to promote women's health. They were arguing that Islam encourages Muslims to protect the rights and education of women.

And they were drawing from verses in the Quran. They were invoking statements and actions of the Prophet Muhammad. They were arguing for and with shari‘a. You can find these arguments across the Muslim world. I'm just giving an example from my research in Africa but this is also happening in the United States. There's a women's mosque in Los Angeles. There are various organizations of progressive and feminist Muslims in Malaysia, Europe, and across the Middle East.

VI: There has been a growing suspicion of shari‘a in the United States but after 9/11 this turned into an anti-Muslim panic that shari‘a could infiltratie the American legal system and constituted a grave threat to our society. As a result the legislatures of nearly all 50 states deemed it necessary to pass laws banning any attempts to introduce shari‘a. 

You write about how some American legislators declared shari‘a to be “evil” and even the European Court of Human Rights said that shari‘a is contrary to recognized principles of human rights. Why did this happen? 

Mark Massoud: In Western countries, there's been a long-standing misunderstanding of Islam, and othering of Islam – what scholars have called a “racialization” of Muslims or Islamophobia. What's interesting I think is that this hatred or vilification of Islam has taken a peculiarly legal foundation, that Islam or Muslims seek to implement a new form of law that will persecute minorities and oppress women, that shari‘a is slowly coming for you and if you do not remain vigilant, it will be too late.

This legalistic view of Islam, of course, leads to the vilification of Islam and the vilification of Muslims, and to surveillance especially in the wake of September 11th and the war on terror. There's more recently been a deeper understanding of the ways that Islam and Muslims have been racialized in the broader project of national security.

VI: Do you think some of this notion of shari‘a trying to be part of a legal system is because some European countries have tried to accommodate certain aspects of Islamic family law? They tried to have pluralistic legal systems that take into account their increasingly multicultural societies?

Mark Massoud: My colleague at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Kathleen Moore has written a wonderful book called The Unfamiliar Abode: Islamic Law in the United States and Britain, about the ways that Muslims in the US and UK live in multiple ‘abodes’ and how both countries have accommodated Islamic family law too. In the US, a couple can sign a Jewish law or Islamic law marriage contract, and courts may uphold that contract not by interpreting Islamic or Hebrew law, but rather by interpreting those documents according to contract law, so long as what's written in the contract is not at odds with American legal principles. 

VI: If you look at these shari‘a bans or restrictions coming out of state legislatures, how do those laws read? Do they just say, "No shari‘a law will ever be part of our state legal system?"

Mark Massoud: It’s often a reference to foreign law or international law too. Eventually, these laws have been struck down by federal courts on constitutional grounds. But that has not stopped states from trying. The University of California, Berkeley has documented more than 200 anti-shari‘a bills to date, that were passed in nearly every U.S. state.

VI: Let’s discuss your new book, which focuses on Somalia and Somaliland and the history of colonial and post-colonial state building in Africa and how shari‘a was a factor. Can you give us some background on how this book evolved?

Mark Massoud: I wrote my first book, Law’s Fragile State, on the ways that various elites used law to govern Sudan, which when I started my research was emerging from Africa’s longest civil war. It was a proliferation of law that moved Sudan between dictatorship and democracy, between colonialism and post-colonialism. Everyone, everywhere, whenever they got any kind of political power, the first thing they would want to do was write new laws, draft new codes, write a new constitution, build courts, build law schools. Whether they had a democratic or dictatorial mindset, whether they were human rights activists or colonial administrators or aid workers, all these various people, as different as they are, used this one primary tool – the law – to govern. 

After writing that book, I retrained my lens onto the origins of the law, which are often outside the law. That's why I traveled to Somalia and Somaliland to understand that question of what shapes our legal systems. I realized there's a theology that undergirds the law. There's a legitimacy that comes from people's understanding and faith in God that shapes why people are willing to build law in the first place. Or they're trying to draw from the legitimacy of God and then break apart law from religion, separating God and religion from a secular legal system that itself derives from the religious legitimacy that a government seeks to have because it claims to rule consistently with God’s will.

This second book that I wrote, Shari‘a, Inshallah, is about how all these different actors, the same kinds of actors from my first book – colonial administrators, post-colonial governments, dictators, people who want to build peace, people who want to perpetuate violence, women's rights activists – these are very different kinds of people, all with their own intentions and purposes. But they're all turning, not just to law, but they're turning to God. They're turning to shari‘a to achieve their goals. They are all invoking shari‘a to achieve the politics they want to achieve.

Even British colonial administrators in what is Somaliland in the first half of the twentieth century – they were not Muslims but they were invoking Islam to the Somali people. They were saying that shari‘a permitted British colonial rule, in order to get local Somalis to listen to the colonial legal system, to abide by its laws, to pay local taxes, to listen to the local Somalis who were hired and paid to work as administrators on behalf of the British government.

VI: Agreements must have been worked with the religious leaders at that time – the imams and the sheikhs who were respected by the local population.

Mark Massoud: British colonial administrators signed treaties with a number of communities basically saying the British would agree not to intervene if the Somalis agreed not to kill them.

VI: So a quid pro quo arrangement?

Mark Massoud: British colonial officials wanted to enable trade for their outposts on the other side of the Gulf of Aden, what's now Yemen. The British had created these agreements with local notables. Somaliland wasn't a colony in the way that India was a colony. It was called a protectorate – the British Somaliland Protectorate. The British agreed to protect Somali communities that allowed the British to trade with them. The British also agreed not to settle or marry Somali women. It was not a settler colony like the United States or Canada was, or like Italy had been trying to do in what is now southern Somalia.

But many Somalis disagreed with the colonial enterprise. A sheikh, a religious leader, his name was Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, he started preaching widely in the late nineteenth century. At first, he was resolving people's disputes and the British were quite happy with him because he was helping to keep peace. A law and order guy. But then he became more political and he challenged colonial authority itself. He became a nationalist leader. He amassed arms and followers, just as the British had their own arms, soldiers, and followers.

An all-out war started between Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah Hassan and his followers and the British administration and the communities that were more supportive of or acquiesced to British colonial rule. 

It was not just a battle of weapons. It was a battle of words too. The British administration publicized remarks from religious leaders in Mecca saying that Sheikh Hassan was doing harm by not following shari‘a. Sheikh Hassan responded to the British that they did not understand shari‘a. It was a battle not just of weapons but of whose interpretation of shari‘a stood – different interpretations of shari‘a that people use to create the world order they want to see around them. 

That is one episode in Somali history, and my book shows how some people are interpreting shari‘a today to do what human rights law ought to be doing. They interpret shari‘a in a way that hopes to builds legitimacy for human rights projects, builds legitimacy for women's rights, builds legitimacy for democracy and gender equality, builds legitimacy for planting democratic roots, for writing progressive constitutions, and so on. 

VI: To bring this into contemporary times, there are a number of parties competing to define and control emerging nations – existing governments and opposition groups, but you also make reference to a third entity contending for influence which is the international community, the UN with its extensive humanitarian apparatus, NGOs with their legions of aid workers, and governmental assistance agencies like USAID. They all come with their own agendas and attitudes about religion and culture and certainly societal-defining concepts like shari‘a. Can you go into the impact this external presence has?

Mark Massoud: I remember attending a workshop in Hargeisa, the capital city of Somaliland. The UN had flown out a European man, a Muslim, for a few days to facilitate a workshop with religious leaders, to get their buy-in for a new UN initiative to construct community dispute resolution offices in the region.

I attended this workshop and at the end of the second day, I went to the facilitator, the consultant, and I asked him why the word shari‘a never came up, especially because the religious leaders were already helping people resolve disputes using shari‘a.

This consultant told me that, while he was well aware of the importance of shari‘a, his funders wanted him to stay silent on Islam. The mission of this particular aid program was to develop these community dispute resolution offices that the UN had developed in many other parts of the world, with little regard for the established dispute resolution efforts that all of these religious leaders were already engaged in, together, every single day of their lives. So you have this externally imposed and parallel process that the UN has decided is necessary and that these men were being asked to support.

VI: In your book you present an interesting case study of women in Somaliland advocating for rights and how they invoke shari‘a to promote their cause. Can you describe these women? Did they have the opportunity to go to school? Were they able to study the Quran and get religious training? How do they use texts from the Quran to justify their rights as women within an Islamic context?

Mark Massoud: The women I met there were sophisticated activists, some of whom were more vocal than others. I met women who from a young age had memorized the Quran and many hundreds or thousands of passages of the Hadith. Certainly these women would be considered religious leaders in other countries like Sudan. Some of them participate in open forums to discuss issues that are important for women in Somaliland.

Many women activists I met were trying to get religious leaders on board with the message that Islam promotes women's health, that Islam promotes women in government, that Islam encourages girls to get educated, including religious training. They wanted sheikhs to speak publicly about women’s rights in the context of Islamic teaching, in the context of shari‘a, which they felt would do a lot more than getting women's rights inserted into a constitution or changing the law. When religious leaders speak out, they can change society in a way that law is supposed to change society – building awareness and appreciation for rights.

VI: While women are not permitted to be religious leaders in contemporary Islamic societies, can women be considered to be religious scholars? 

Mark Massoud: It really depends on the country. In Sudan, for example, there are women judges, women Islamic judges. There are women Islamic scholars teaching at universities. It is common to have women in leadership positions interpreting Islam, interpreting the sources of shari‘a. Somalia and Somaliland, these are very different places where women are not seen as religious leaders. In the history of Islam, there are many women interpreters of the Quran and Hadith. Some of the earliest interpreters of shari‘a were women, and men had to follow their decisions. I wrote about this in an article for The Conversation. There's a history of women scholars over the centuries in Islam. But of course politics intervenes, men intervene, and things start to change over the years as they have in a lot of societies.

VI: Do you see these Islamic women activists making progress? They may not be achieving goals Western feminists would consider significant but if they are impacting their communities, their societies, how women live their daily lives, how girls are offered more opportunities, isn’t that an important accomplishment?

Mark Massoud: Absolutely. Across the Muslim world, women are telling one another that it’s okay under Islam for your daughters to play sports as long as they are playing sports separately from boys, that it’s okay that your daughters go to school,  to law school or become  police officers, if your daughters want to do that, because the prophet Muhammad said very clearly that girls and boys should both be educated. There is a religious and cultural teaching well-known in the region that if you educate a girl, then you educate an entire nation, because that girl educates her family members, and education grows from there.

There are more women in law schools, more women in leadership positions. Somaliland in 2021 had its first elections in some time, and more women stood for election than ever before. Things are changing. There are women government ministers. It's not happening as fast as I think many women would like, but change is happening.

Of course, many societies struggle to include women in politics. In the US we've never had a woman president. There is not a representative number of women in Congress, especially the Senate, and still relatively few people of color. We all struggle with this. 

VI: Are the activist Islamic women's groups networked throughout the continent of Africa and maybe even beyond in the global Islamic world, sharing their experiences and their methodologies of how to gain more rights and positions for women within Muslim societies?

Mark Massoud: Yes. The more sophisticated non-governmental organizations are getting funding from the United Nations and international NGOs to set up meaningful networks to communicate with one another and share their expertise. Before COVID restrictions, conferences took place where women from places like Somaliland, Somalia, Uganda, Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti would get together and share stories, share ideas - where Muslim women from these countries get together to provide support for one another. It's really exciting that it's not just Western aid groups sharing the message of women's rights, but rather it's these women themselves sharing their own message of Muslim feminist rights.

VI: Mark, thank you for this conversation. We have learned more about what shari‘a is, how it developed over the centuries within Islamic teachings and how it can be a dynamic element in Muslim societies. It will be interesting to see how progressive forces within the Islamic world employ their vision of shari‘a for the good of all their fellow Muslims and for the world we all share.

Mark Massoud: As many of the people I met say, Inshallah.

Mark Fathi Massoud is Professor of Politics and Director of Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An expert on the relationship of politics, law, and religion, he is the author of Shari‘a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics and Law’s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, San Francisco Chronicle, Africa Report, BBC News, Slate, and the Conversation. Massoud holds JD and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and he has held visiting positions at Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, and McGill universities. Follow him on Twitter @profmassoud.