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I read Prof Ovamir's latest offering^[1] with interest as he speculates about the murder of Sharia at the hands of modernity. It is a brilliant read that encapsulates some of the themes that others have covered in the past. A couple of choice passages:

Rarely is the foundational document of a debate also its most sophisticated exposition, and this is one of those occasions. Juwaynī’s highly original treatise has been treated in several modern works, including my own study of its political imaginary, language, and metaphor. Wael Hallaq’s dated but seminal article “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” explores the related but distinct problem of the so-called closing of the gate of ijtihād (insidād bāb al-ijtihād). It is distinct because although it shares the idea of the end of ijtihād, it potentially signals the completion and flourishing of the sharīʿa rather than its extinction. Incidentally, if my characterization of Juwaynī’s view is correct, based on the four stages of decline discussed below, the phrase khuluww al-zamān ʿan al-sharīʿa (the absence of the sharīʿa from any given time) is closer to Hallaq’s rendering of it as extinction rather than Ahmad’s preference, fatigue

Juwayni is an interesting figure in Islamic history, postulating the disintegration of Islamicate order and how it may come about. Recently, there has been some worthwhile scholarship excavating the foundations of authority ^[2]. However, the most fascinating paper I've come across in the English language remains that of Meguid who puts Juwayni in conversation with Carl Schmitt, that I don't think has received as much attention as it should have done, probably because it is sadly languishing behind a dreary paywall and only Nablusian doomer wordcels like the present author would go hunting for it on libgen. ^[3]

Meguid argues that in contrast to Schmitt's "fatalistic" characterisation as "inescapabaly dictatorial", Juywani inverts Schmittian sovereignty by premising it on a very distinct early-Ashari conception of rationality and experience using his well known Ghiyath.

I'm not sure if I share the Juwaynian optimism that Meguid eloquently argues for in his paper, especially when he writes:

In the absence of these theologians and jurists, individuals are expected to have a bare minimum of intellectual and practical capacity to exercise reason. In such a case, resorting to reason becomes a must, and hence general rules that achieve a degree of regularity that de facto work to build the Muslim body politic. In other words, contrary to Schmitt’s assumption about it as a monotonous imposition on the existentially arbitrary exercise of power, the rational regularity, according to al-Juwayni, is a constituent fundamental of the body politic that unfolds as the foundation of sovereignty.

Meguid also brings in Honig's Jewish critiques of Schmitt which which was a novel way of reading Schmitt that I hadn't come across before.

I believe amidst the Praetorian and Surveillance state architecture of many modern Islamicate states, that notions of a considered religious rationalism based on a carefully cultivated metaphysics seem implausible. The conditions, the circumstances for a new considered Islamicate rationality to emerge as simultaneously a buffer against the encroachment of the Western liberalism in all its guises whilst dealing with indigenous models of tyranny are incredibly inhospitable. Such a considered rationality may emerge in an environment where there is a novel Islamicate conception of Technology that places Sovereignty at the heart of everything in terms of ownership and a strong foe-friend distinction.

The Death of Sharia is a death not necessarily of sentiment, belief or passion but rather the death of organized and cultivated forms of polycentric order and embedded juristic articulation within local communities. Sharia is more activity - a symphony in motion rather than an abstract object or museum artifact, and so it is that movement is life. Without movement, without considered spaces for Islamicate rationality to flourish amidst hostile forces within and without the Sharia is dying and it does not seem any imminent therapeutic interventions or outright resuscitation is on the horizon.

Footnotes