Contemporary Islamic legal studies—both inside and outside the Muslim world—
commonly relies upon a secular distortion of law. In this article, I use translation as a
metonym for secular transformations and, accordingly, I will demonstrate how secular
ideology translates the Islamic tradition. A secular translation converts the Islamic tradition into “religion” (the non-secular) and Islamic law into “sharia”—
to represent the English mispronunciation of the Arabic word شريعة
a term intended
(sharīʿah).
I explore the differences between historical Islamic terms and secular terms in order
to demonstrate that coloniality generates religion and religious law; in turn, these two
notions convert شريعة (sharīʿah) into “sharia” in both Arabic and non-Arabic languages.
Consequently, the notion of “sharia” is part of a colonial system of meaning