Sharīʿah in the Modern World: Reviewing Mashal Ayobi’s ‘The Light We Lost’

A Book Review of The Light We Lost: Grappling with Shariah in the Modern World by Mashal Ayobi

The aftermath of the catastrophic Bondi shooting, and the start of Zohran Mamdani’s term as Mayor of New York, has put Muslims, terrorism, the Sharīʿah and the like back into the limelight of oriental focus, the favored standpoint of viewing geopolitical and socioeconomic crises. In that and similar contexts, The Light We Lost: Grappling with Shariah in the Modern World is, in the clearest sense, a reclamation project. Mashal Ayobi is trying to take “Shariah” back from multiple hostage-takers: cable-news caricature, Muslim community squeamishness, and the internalized secular moral worldview that makes Western (and to be frank, many Eastern) Muslims flinch.

The book’s approach is not an academic monograph, so it should not be read in that light. Ayobi, a student of knowledge and Director of the Institute for Muslim Advancement and Renewal (IMAR) in California, comes from a confessional, anecdotal lens that is animated by the single persistent claim that what modern people call “neutral law” is itself a moral formation project. Below, I summarize broadly points of interest, and end with a final assessment. As both an US-educated attorney and student of the Islamic sciences in Egypt, I am more than sympathetic to the book’s instinct to refuse apologetics and to treat revelation as the standard, in place of interrogating as though it is the defendant, but I’m also persnickety about historical and juristic precision.

The book begins where many Western Muslim stories begin, and she begins from the memory of her Afghan family in the aftermath of war. Then 9/11 arrives, collective guilt and Islam is something she must constantly explain, as is the ensuing clash of civilizations, so to speak, betwixt the Orient and the Occident, Shari’ah and secularism, liberalism and illiberalism, etcetera.

From there, the author’s first major autobiographical shift diagnoses the unease of the immigrant and diaspora. She describes how many first-generation Muslims learn Islam as a containment strategy, which helps set up her thesis that Sharīʿah in the West is an anxiety object inside Muslim life, too, due to Muslims inheriting it in fragments. For example, the body and purpose of fiqh is atomized into a simple list of do’s and don’ts. (This is aside from her book, but this lens has now trickled down into Muslim-majority societies, such that the average literate Muslim would rather look to those same anxiety-inducing sources to understand their own tradition as somehow a more ‘credible’ view). Her second move is conceptual and pulls away from the focus on the Sharīʿah’s “law/punishments/state” into a comprehensive God-centered way of life. She repeatedly frames the Sharīʿah as a living tradition meant to shape everything from wages to interpersonal relationships, contracts, consumption to the environment. Lastly, her civilizational point is that the Sharīʿah was pushed into the margins by colonial disruption and then further damaged by the modern nation-state’s structure. She leans on Dr. Wael Hallaq as she narrates the legal rupture and uses examples of French Algeria’s confinement of Shariah to personal status, the destruction of awqāf (religious and charitable endowments), and then the tragic afterlife wherein “independence” was in reality with colonial architecture and mechanisms intact. 

The meat of the second half of the book is a series of set-piece confrontations-turned-moral-resolutions with the usual pressure points. Hudūd (fixed punishments for specific crimes), for example, is a constrained last resort surrounded by evidentiary brakes and a mercy-maximizing legal culture. Modern controversies around gender and gender relations, like qiwāma, ḥaya, and modesty are treated first as moral and character formation before a set of material etiquette. From there, she zooms out to a civilizational picture of modern law smuggling a theology of autonomy, markets, bureaucracy, and colonialism, presented as unbiased and objective, and imbibing of this is what makes it difficult to absorb the reality of sacred law. Her revival prescription is correspondingly about rebuilding institutions (education, endowments, mediation/arbitration in the legal sphere, etc.).

Much of the analysis is done through a process of personal questioning. On the dualities of modern moral instincts (“justice = equality” “autonomy = dignity” “consent = morality”) and that of the Sharīʿah (justice as divine standard, moral formation preceding enforcement, etc.), she writes:

“The highest virtue, it seemed, was not in committing to an objective moral framework but in embracing the endless deconstruction of all frameworks, and the reconstruction of new ones. The more skeptical you were of absolutes, the more enlightened you appeared.

In those early years, I actually found comfort in this because it sort of meant I didn’t have to reconcile my faith with modern morality. After all, wasn’t everything relative? However, the more I sat with that mindset, the more I felt something was off. 

If morality was just a social construct and justice was constantly shifting, then what stopped the world from justifying oppression in new and creative ways? If there was no higher, transcendent truth, then what separated divine justice from whatever laws a society decided to create? Is justice just whatever the law says it is? Laws have justified apartheid, allowed for colonization, mass incarceration, genocide, and the legal murder of civilians in war zones. If society gets to decide what’s right and wrong, then justice can be bent to serve whoever is in power. If there’s no higher moral authority who defines justice, then we’re all just making it up.”¹

The colonialism/state critiques are her strongest sections but also where they need to avoid overreach. Her central claim here is true and difficult to overstate: the consequences of the rupture posed by colonialism and the fall of the Ottoman caliphate shredded the civilizational muscle-memory by which Muslims once understood their lives. Colonial powers and ideologies disfigured law in Muslim lands, reduced the Sharīʿah’s domain and by doing so left behind centralized bureaucratic states that later regimes used against their own populations. But not every contemporary failure is a result of colonisation, because not only do postcolonial elites today make heinous choices, pre-colonial states and Muslim societies were not static utopia and the classical tradition itself has internal debates on siyāsa (politics and governance), coercion, and statecraft, sometimes in contradiction with one another. 

Additionally, a genealogy from natural law to Enlightenment to contemporary expressive individualism, would strengthen her argument by showing which moral metaphysics we reject, and why. While she does this partially, for example, in the section on corporal and capital punishments (and interestingly refers to Steven Pinker’s humanitarian revolution thesis), what I refer to is foundationally situating the West’s own moral shifts. The book usefully diagnoses the practical volatility of contemporary liberal moral reasoning, particularly where consent and autonomy operate as near-exclusive public criteria. Even a short brief would prevent an avoidable straw-man and sharpen the book’s target of late-modern secularism as the governing moral regime.

The book’s persuasive force depends in part on repetition, by-design, returning again to the same contrasts between the divine moral formation and that of the secular through new anecdotes and angles, but that also creates bloat by re-opening conclusions previously made. A durable analysis needs tight historically and factually grounded claims, and a steadier style between critique, reflection, anecdote and contemporary political expression. There are enough factual errors and misspellings that would benefit from a firm editorial hand, and this is a common issue with smaller Muslim publishers. If one is looking for a book that speaks along the lines of “I used to be nervous about the Shariah; now I’m not, and here is the worldview shift that made that possible,” Ayobi’s book will resonate.

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Works Cited:

1. Ayobi, Mashal. The Light We Lost: Grappling with Shariah in the Modern World. I’MAR (Institute for Muslim Advancement & Renewal), 2025. Page 79. [↩]