Modern Things on Trial

Leor Halevi's original study offers important perspectives on turn of the twentieth-century Islamic reformist thought in the context of changing relations between law and material history. He matches up instructive readings in legal opinions delivered in Cairo by Rashid Rida with innovative background research on the new products and technologies that prompted questions to him from around the Muslim world. -- Brinkley Messick, author of Sharīʿa Scripts: A Historical Anthropology
This nuanced, meticulously researched, yet accessible study illuminates how significant early-twentieth-century debates on Islamic law often revolved around some surprisingly ordinary objects and how local anxieties and input shaped a reformist Islam with transregional appeal. Halevi's focus on the material dimensions of modern Islamic thought adds a very welcome and promising dimension to the scholarship in this field. -- Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of Islam in Pakistan: A History
By tracing the evolution of 'laissez-faire Salafism' in response to consumerconcerns about the religious status of new commodities and technologies, Halevi positions Islam's modern reformation as driven more by materialist than ideational forces. This is a highly original rethinking of the old question of religion and modernity by looking at the material transformations—the 'modern things'—that Muslims acquired from the industrializing West. -- Nile Green, Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History, University of California, Los Angeles
This is a remarkable intervention by a pioneering scholar of Islamic law and material culture. Focusing on Rashid Rida, a leading light of modern Islamic reform, it highlights the material entanglements that catalyzed his legal rulings on novel commodities, technologies, and financial instruments. In place of dogmatism and idealism, what emerges is a riveting narrative of pragmatic and materialist accommodations in a period marked by the impact of capitalism, consumerism, and colonialism. This is revisionist history in the best sense. -- Finbarr Barry Flood, director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories, New York University
An outstanding work that sets a new standard for the writing of modern Islamic intellectual history...this book will prove of enduring interest to researchers in Islamic law and modern Islamic thought, historians of the late imperial and early nation-state Muslim worlds, and students of the processes of globalization more generally. * American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences *
Halevi sheds light on Islam’s relationship with modernity by offering an account of how Islamic revivalists first responded to modern transformations through religious and legal rulings. * Middle East Journal *
This excellent book is paradigm shifting. . . Essential. * Choice *
Halevi’s work contributes to the larger understanding of how Islamic reform in this period was often driven through the
historical narrative of Riḍā as a reformer, illustrating a bottom-up process. * Arab Studies Quarterly *
A fresh, lively, and materialist intervention against reductive readings of modern Islam. * Jadaliyya *
By rejecting abstractions like “Westernization” and turning instead to how tangible things were weighed on the moral scale of sharia, Leor Halevi presents a bold and lucid new analysis of the making of modern Islam. * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Halevi’s book charts the way for other scholars of law and history to write history grounded in an eclectic mix of materials in several languages from various archives around the world. * Law and Social Inquiry *
Halevi’s compelling monograph is relevant to a large audience and should interest global historians and historians of empire as much as scholars of modern Islam. * American Historical Review *
He not only weaves intellectual and economic history together but comes forth with a contribution that is as ground breaking and original regarding the development of a consumer culture as it is concerning legal reform. * Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *
The writing is clear, engaging, and accessible. In addition to classes on Islam, the arguments advanced here
may be pertinent to courses on theory in religious studies. * International Journal of Middle East Studies *
It is a new way of looking at the issue of religion and modernity. Among other things, this book would be an excellent focus for graduates reading law and change in the modern Muslim world. * Technology and Culture *