Wael Hallaq's Hermeneutics of the Qur'an: A Critical Study of His Historical-Legal Approach

Wael Hallaq is regarded as one of the prominent contemporary Western scholars of Islamic law who has extensively examined the sources, formation, development, juristic theories, and relationship of Islamic law with the modern state from historical and legal perspectives. An important contemporary debate concerning Hallaq’s thought is whether he recognizes the Qur’an as a revealed scripture and Islam as a revealed religion, or whether his religious formulations concerning the Qur’an and Islam merely represent a descriptive account of the Muslim intellectual tradition. This article presents a comparative and critical study of the major discussions in Hallaq’s A History of Islamic Legal Theories (1997), The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (2004/2005), An Introduction to Islamic Law (2009), and Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations (2009). The study demonstrates that, at certain points, Hallaq describes the Qur’an as revealed by God, as the most sacred source of Islamic law, and the combination of reason and revelation as a fundamental source of law. However, isolating these formulations from the broader analytical framework of his writings and treating them as expressions of his own theological position remains open to question. Within Hallaq’s historical-legal methodology, the Qur’an is explained particularly through concepts such as Quranic legal material, legislation, legal verses, Quranic legal ethic, community formation, customary law, Prophetic authority, historical development, legal formation, and juristic elaboration. Accordingly, his primary explanatory question appears to be how Islamic law was historically formed, rather than how revelation, as a metaphysical and legislative reality, provides the fundamental and ultimate explanation for the existence of law. The article concludes that the stronger basis for critiquing Hallaq’s conception of the Qur’an is not the claim that he explicitly denies revelation, but rather the methodological tension between the Qur’an’s revelatory status and its historical-legal explanation in his scholarship. In the traditional Islamic conception of revelation, the Qur’an is not merely a revealed text but, in itself, a divine source of guidance, authority, and legislation. By contrast, within Hallaq’s historical-legal framework, the legal function of the Qur’an is explained in connection with historical context, Prophetic practice, Arabian customary law, community formation, and juristic development. This approach differs from the traditional Islamic perspective.