Book Reviews 119

Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning:
Encountering Our Legal Other

Anver M. Emon, ed.
London: Oneworld, 2016. 273 pages.

This book comes at a very advantageous time, for interfaith encounters have
become 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 Jewish
Legal Reasoning: Encountering Our Legal Other is precisely the type of text
and rigorous academic guide to lead us at a time when so many religious laws
are misunderstood – especially between Jews and Muslims.

The authors ask some questions: “Can the traditions of Judaism and Islam
be read together through a legal religious lens without always having a com-
mon ground?” and “Can dialogue precipitate a philosophical framework that
can demonstrate self-critical thought and still be engaged with the ‘Other’?”
More importantly, in each section ask the authors some core questions about
religion and law in order to show why the modern preoccupation with reli-
gious law is so relevant. In addition, through their methodological legal analy-
sis, they at times demonstrate why religious law is irrelevant. The scholars
featured this book are meticulous, thought-provoking, and timely in terms of
their significant lines of questioning.

The book is unique in its conception, for Anver M. Emon and the contrib-
utors’ organic approach makes it more accessible and, at the same time, aca-
demically rigorous. The book emerged from workshops and was “developed
further when Emon went to Cambridge University to join Gibbs and others in
the Scriptural Reasoning project, where scholars read the scriptural texts of
multiple traditions with scholars from those different traditions” (p. xi). Scrip-
tural reasoning allows one to read another’s scriptures in a way that allows for
personal readings and reactions to one another’s sacred text, an approach that
allows for “recognizing their own otherness to their own respective traditions”
(p. xxiii).

Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning opens up deeply complex and glar-
ing issues of interpretation, authority of interpretation, and the historical con-
ditions of reading sacred text, especially for religious law. In the first chapter,
“Assuming Power: Judges, Imagined Authorities, and the Quotidian,” Rumee
Ahmed and Aryeh Cohen introduce us to this complex problem of authority
and 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

ajiss34-1_ajiss  1/23/2017  11:56 AM  Page 119



Talmudic manner, the underlying questions of authority, law, and action. For
example, Ahmed asserts: “When ‘law’ is fronted with ‘religious,’ we tend to
think of a different kind of law than the secular, governance-oriented law to
which we are used” (p. 21). He makes an indelible point as regards contem-
porary laws that are countering such challenges in countries like France re-
garding the ban on traditional attire for Muslim women.

The text encapsulates the major legal topics of the day (e.g., women, an-
imals, virginity, war, and sovereignty) and takes them to older legal reasonings
from the Mishnah and the Hadith. As a reader, one is left craving more analysis
and references that enable one to explore other topics and texts in detail. In
the intriguing third chapter, “The Cowering Calf and the Thirsty Dog: Nar-
rating and Legislating Kindness to Animals in Jewish and Islamic Texts,” Beth
Berkowitz and Marion Katz take on issues of compassion and legal obligations
toward animals, keeping in mind the sacred and textual obligations of the in-
dividual. For example: 

Both set of texts define responsibilities toward animals; the first Mishnah
and Talmud passages require a person to assist in the unloading of a bur-
dened animal, while Ibn Qudama likens animals to wives and slaves and re-
quires house holder to care for them in a comparable way. The second set of
texts, the Talmudic story about Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi and al-Nawai, both
dramatize animal suffering by linking it to human suffering and promising
reward to the person who attends to that suffering. (p. 108)

This rich and provocative dialogue and textual analysis relies on the scholars’
rigorous commitment to analyze reason as well as how the text is written
rhetorically.

Chapter 2, “Guardianship of Women in Islamic and Jewish Legal Texts”
(Rachel Adler and Ayesha S. Chaudhry) relates some deep and provocative
issues of men, women, age, and economy. The dialogue and text in this chapter
pushes the frame of authority through an analysis of legal reasoning from both
the Jewish and Muslim feminist perspectives. Demonstrating the many loop-
holes in judiciary moments in both patriarchal traditions, the authors question
one another’s traditions by simple questions and rhetorical conjectures at the
end. For example, Chaudhry reflects on the Jewish legal text: “Q: Can a father
betroth his daughter without her consent? A. It would appear so. [The text
does not say so explicitly. However, it completely ignores the question of con-
sent, treating the daughter as an object who may be betrothed, rather than as
a free, independent agent who might have a say in her betrothal.]” (p. 47).
This type of questioning of the text from the other tradition’s perspective be-
tween a female Jew and a female Muslim allows for a differing of questioning
and understanding of one another’s tradition.

120 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:1

ajiss34-1_ajiss  1/23/2017  11:56 AM  Page 120



Furthermore, in chapter 5, Arye Edrei and Enver M. Emon’s “Sovereignty,
Law, and the Pedagogy of Historical Fantasy: On the Halakha on the Laws of
War and the Fiqh on Dhimmis,” one finds a complex but very important analy-
sis and dialogue on sovereignty and law. The authors’ use of the phrase “Ped-
agogy of Historical Fantasy” is seductive, and as one reads through the chapter
the subtitle becomes essential to how Jews and Muslims recall or remember
one another’s historical context. This chapter reconstructs the types of fantasy
– I would say nostalgia – that Jews and Muslims have exerted through theo-
logical concerns: 

To (re)turn to history, or return to a particular history, is prospectively pro-
grammatic. For religious Zionists the return to history is a call to action. For
conservative Muslims the return to a particular history draws upon the past
to frame the path to the future, and ultimately redemption. (p. 212) 

Edrei and Emon rethink for us the modern misperception between Jews and
Muslims in terms of the political conflict of Israel and Palestine, a refreshing
move and revival of texts that discuss more volatile threads that the authors
term “Historical Fantasy.”

Chapter 6, Adam B. Seligman’s “Cross-Textual Reflections on Tradition,
Reason, and Authority,” reflects upon the book in both philosophical and the-
oretical terms and also raises questions of legality, authority, and reason with
a keen sense of illuminated dialogue. In other words, the book itself is dialogical
and inherently philosophical, as Seligman points out: “What our authors have
achieved here is what Buber calls ‘genuine dialogue,’ which is the real meeting
of an I and a Thou and through which – and only through which – are the cre-
ative potentialities of human cultural production possible” (p. 228). In the final
chapter, “The Social Life of Reason” by Robert Gibbs, the reader is left with
some good questions and open-ended ways to read one another’s texts in
today’s challenge of religious law and secularism. The book leaves one with a
desire to do more research and dialogue with other traditions in order to fully
grapple with the meanings underlying Gibbs’ conclusion: “The dialogue is con-
stituted by the Socratic moment of learning that we don’t know” (p. 246).

This refreshing book has a powerful theme and, through its rare dialogical
methodology, presents the work of conscientious scholars who are determined
to open up the world of legal reasoning within Jewish and Muslim texts.

Mehnaz M. Afridi
Assistant Professor, Religious Studies Department

Director, Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center
Manhattan College, New York, NY

Book Reviews 121

ajiss34-1_ajiss  1/23/2017  11:56 AM  Page 121