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Journey Through Shari'a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
April 2012
On Sale: April 10, 2012
384 pages
ISBN: 0374168725
EAN: 9780374168728
Kindle: B005XMKAGY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Religion | Non-Fiction Political
In the wake of the colossal acts of terrorism of the last
decade, the legal historian and human rights lawyer Sadakat
Kadri realized that many people in the West had ideas about
the origins and implications of the shari‘a, or Islamic law,
that were hazy, contradictory, or simply wrong. Even as
“shari‘a” became a loaded word and an all-encompassing
explanation, most of us remained ignorant of its true
meaning. And we were doing this at our peril. In Heaven on Earth, Kadri brings lucid wit and analytical
skill to the thrilling and turbulent story of Islam’s
foundation and expansion. He shows how legal ideas gradually
evolved out of thousands of reports about the Prophet
Mohammad, most of which were not even written down until two
centuries after his death. And he explains how, just in the
last forty years, the shari‘a has been appropriated and
transformed by hardliners desperate to impose their
oppressive vision. In the second half of the book, Kadri
takes us on an extraordinary journey through more than half
a dozen countries in the Islamic world, where he explores,
in striking detail, how the shari‘a is taught, read,
reinterpreted, reverenced, and challenged—beginning at the
eight-hundred-year old Indian grave of his Sufi mystic
ancestor, and ending in Cairo’s City of the Dead, where one
of Islam’s greatest legal scholars still gets daily requests
for legal miracles twelve centuries after his death. Heaven on Earth is a brilliantly iconoclastic tour through
one of history’s great collective intellectual achievements,
as complex as the religion that brought it to life. The
shari‘a continues to shape both explosive political
circumstances and the daily life of more than a billion
Muslims, and Sadakat Kadri has given us a compelling and
clarifying portrait of a changeable world of faith, reason,
and justice.
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