Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning

Abstract

This book comes at a very advantageous time, for interfaith encounters havebecome part of a larger conversation in academic and non-academic circles.Journals and conferences have added the dimension of how to understand the“other” and create dialogue in many innovative ways. Islamic and JewishLegal Reasoning: Encountering Our Legal Other is precisely the type of textand rigorous academic guide to lead us at a time when so many religious lawsare misunderstood – especially between Jews and Muslims.The authors ask some questions: “Can the traditions of Judaism and Islambe read together through a legal religious lens without always having a commonground?” and “Can dialogue precipitate a philosophical framework thatcan demonstrate self-critical thought and still be engaged with the ‘Other’?”More importantly, in each section ask the authors some core questions aboutreligion and law in order to show why the modern preoccupation with religiouslaw is so relevant. In addition, through their methodological legal analysis,they at times demonstrate why religious law is irrelevant. The scholarsfeatured this book are meticulous, thought-provoking, and timely in terms oftheir significant lines of questioning.The book is unique in its conception, for Anver M. Emon and the contributors’organic approach makes it more accessible and, at the same time, academicallyrigorous. The book emerged from workshops and was “developedfurther when Emon went to Cambridge University to join Gibbs and others inthe Scriptural Reasoning project, where scholars read the scriptural texts ofmultiple traditions with scholars from those different traditions” (p. xi). Scripturalreasoning allows one to read another’s scriptures in a way that allows forpersonal readings and reactions to one another’s sacred text, an approach thatallows for “recognizing their own otherness to their own respective traditions”(p. xxiii).Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning opens up deeply complex and glaringissues of interpretation, authority of interpretation, and the historical conditionsof reading sacred text, especially for religious law. In the first chapter,“Assuming Power: Judges, Imagined Authorities, and the Quotidian,” RumeeAhmed and Aryeh Cohen introduce us to this complex problem of authorityand complex phenomenon through legal schools of thought in both traditions.The question of God as authority is crucial, as the authors ask, almost in a ...