Machine summary:
Iyad Zahalka’s commendable Shari’a in the Modern Era: Muslim Minorities Jurisprudence gives researchers and legal practitioners an overview of the emerging fiqh al-aqalliyyāt (the jurisprudence of minorities) discipline.
In fact, at the time of its publication several other books were published on this subject, among them Uriya Shavit’s Shari’a and Muslim Minorities: The Wasati and Salafi Approaches to Fiqh al-Aqalliyyāt al-Muslima (Oxford: Ox ford University Press, 2015) and Said Fares Hassan’s Fiqh al-Aqalliyyāt: His tory, Development, and Progress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
ajiss34-1_ajiss 1/23/112017:56 AM Page 115 Zahalka credits Shavit with giving him useful comments while preparing Shari’ah in the Modern Era. It is no coincidence that all of these books are from a Sunni perspective with particular focus on the works of two well-known scholars in the Sunni legal world:Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Taha Jabir al-Alwani (d.
Zahalka’s book, therefore, captures the gradual creation of another – or perhaps a new – branch of fiqh that focuses on the socio-legal issuesfaced by Muslimsruled by non-Muslim sovereigns or systems that conflict with Islamic law.
Chapter 1 deals with this emerging discipline’s theoretical background and evolution, chapter 2 presentsits methodology and implementation in personal status law, chapter 3 deals with the Shari’a’s im plementation in general and that of the jurisprudence of minorities in partic ular, chapter 4 explains the case of Israel in the context of this discipline, and chapter 5 provides some thoughts on its future.