The Collapse of the Rule of Recognition:

Polycentric Shari’ah Governance and the Crisis of Islamic Legal Legitimacy in the Transnational Age

Nehal Ahmad

 

Abstract: Classical Islamic jurisprudence located interpretive authority within a recognisable grammar: a validated class of epistemic agents, a political authority willing to implement scholarly reasoning, and a mechanism of collective validation capable of converting interpretive diversity into binding normativity. That grammar is now in an advanced state of fragmentation. This article advances an original theory of polycentric Shari’ah governance as the defining structural condition of Islamic jurisprudence in the twenty-first century, a condition in which authority claims over Islamic law are simultaneously contested, spatially unbounded, institutionally fragmented, and algorithmically mediated. Drawing on H.L.A. Hart’s rule of recognition, Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority, and Çelik’s reconstruction of distributed sovereignty in al-Mawardi, al-Juwayni, and al-Farabi, the article constructs a four-mode taxonomy of Islamic legal legitimation: hierarchical-institutional, state-derivative, pragmatic-contextual, and charismatic-digital. It applies it across four analytically distinct sites of authority production: Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta, British Shari’ah councils, the Deoband transnational network, and digital fatwa platforms. The article argues that this transformation constitutes not merely institutional diversification but a jurisprudential crisis of the rule of recognition for Islamic law itself, producing what it terms legitimacy arbitrage among Muslim communities globally. Implications are drawn for legal pluralism theory, international human rights law’s engagement with Islamic legal norms, and the future of Muslim-minority jurisprudence in democratic states.