"Both a conceptual inquiry into Islamic law developed through Islamic thought and a genealogy of modern law, this book offers a new way to conceptualize Shari'a and Western law, their encounter and their duality. Rather than confining Islam to a "religion", The Life of Shari'a takes it as an ethical episteme with its own concepts and categories through which the world and the self are known, shaping forms of life in contemporary Muslim societies. Immersed in philosophy, political theory, theology, and jurisprudence, this book engages with great works of Islamic and Western thought. In The Life of Shari'a, Islamic knowledges inform a critical historical anthropology of modern law, bringing its Christian trajectory and its circulation outside Europe under a new light"--