Practical wisdom and Islam: reimagining Islamic law, from the local to the global

This chapter aims to mitigate the ‘otherness’ often attributed to Islamic law, which is sometimes claimed to be incommensurable with principles in other traditions. It draws on local and global contexts: legal anthropologies in the Middle East and North Africa, and writing on the emerging field of Islamic environmental jurisprudence. Applying the Aristotelian concept of phronesis, practical wisdom, as an interpretive tool in cases such as issuing fatwas, it shows how they appear less alien when we trace the operations of practitioners’ ethical interventions, helping individuals move on from their predicaments in constructive directions. This aims at widening avenues for scholarly analysis of Islamic legal practices, and at using methods of intercultural understanding to assuage a source of avoidable tension between Muslim and non-Muslim communities.