Radical Separation of Powers: A History of Islamic Constitutionalism

by Wael B. Hallaq

Two centuries of Orientalist scholarship have denied that Islam has a constitutional concept. Premodern Islamic political practice has been subject to mistranslation, misinterpretation and condescension through the eyes of colonisers, and judged inferior to the norms of Western liberalism. Wael Hallaq, a leading scholar of Islamic law, sets the record straight in this groundbreaking volume. Traumatised by the tyranny of absolute monarchies, Europe came to see in Islam everything that it despised about itself. By seeking to understand Islamic governance from within its own tradition of reason, Hallaq reveals premodern Islam to have a rich and distinctive constitutional starting from the individual as a political subject up to the power of executives.

Genres: History, Law, Religion

592 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication February 24, 2026

About the author

Wael B. Hallaq is a scholar of Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history. His teaching and research deal with the problematic epistemic ruptures generated by the onset of modernity and the socio-politico-historical forces subsumed by it; with the intellectual history of Orientalism and the repercussions of Orientalist paradigms in later scholarship and in Islamic legal studies as a whole; and with the synchronic and diachronic development of Islamic traditions of logic, legal theory, and substantive law and the interdependent systems within these traditions.

Hallaq’s writings have explored the structural dynamics of legal change in pre-modern law, and have recently been examining the centrality of moral theory to understanding the history of Islamic law. His books include Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians (1993); A History of Islamic Legal Theories An Introduction to Sunni Usul al-fiqh (1997); Authority Continuity and Change in Islamic Law (2001); and An Introduction to Islamic Law (2009). Shari‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (2009) examines the doctrines and practices of Islamic law within the context of its history, from its beginnings in seventh-century Arabia, through its development and transformation under the Ottomans, and across lands as diverse as India, Africa and South-East Asia, to the present. Hallaq’s work has been widely read, and translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Japanese, Indonesian and Hebrew.