Theorizing Islam without the state: Islamic discourses on the minority status of Muslims in the West

Neither law nor religion is endowed with intrinsic, substantial and natural authority. There are only punctual situations where people orient to something that they identify as being religious law, the authority of which they publicly acknowledge. There is henceforth no way to examine the reference to Islamic law outside its circumstantial and situated uses, that is, outside practices of referring to an object explicitly characterised as Islamically legal in various contexts, each one having its own constraints.