Ibn Maghreb on Nostr: There is an arresting paragraph in Hallaq's Impossible State where he talks about how ...

There is an arresting paragraph in Hallaq's Impossible State where he talks about how the paradigm of the modern state finds no overlap or common cause with that of Islamic governance:

"Nor did Islamic governance know anything like the scale of surveillance generated by the modern state’s police and prison systems. These, so normalized and a matter of fact today, would have been horrifying to Muslims as specters of domination and cruelty. Nor, still, did Islamic rule so much as tamper with the sphere of education, which remained not only private but also nonformal and highly accessible, accommodating the entire spectrum of social strata"

There are a few times in the Impossible State where Hallaq touches upon the coercive and pervasive net of surveillance the modern state casts over everything it sees in an effort to shape the moral nature of its citizens. Nearly every time he does so he references Foucault's work which is to be expected given his intervention in this particular facet of political philosophy.

Hallaq though does not reference the Cypherpunks as a philosophical resource even though the two share striking similarities. One of the biggest drawbacks with Hallaq's work is there is not enough translation of how his astute theoretical analysis translates into the modern machinery of the State in terms of how it actually works. This does not detract from the merit of his work at all, but there is an opportunity that goes begging.

The modern State is a parasite that logs everything you do, leaving no sphere for an "individual" to truly emerge, it is a consumptive pathology that leaves no space for autonomy even though it dresses itself up in the rhetoric of High Enlightenment aesthetics. This inescapable fact that is now proven beyond reproach is the ultimate vindication of the Hallaqian thesis.