Juridical Dialectic as ‘Theory’:The Case of Ghāyat al-Amal fī ʿIlm al-Jadal

The coloniality of western theory still rears its head anthology after anthology. In the Arab-speaking world, the challenge of ‘theory’ propelled critics to reconstruct 'theory' in premodern poetics then philosophy with the exclusion of jurisprudence. Intriguingly, the Arab-Islamic religious sciences developed an indigenous dialectic that resisted the intrusions of the ancient Greek dialectic, persisting until now in centers of religious learning. Modern colonial theory would never consider this kind of dialectic as part of theory. Focusing on Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī’s Ghāyat al-amal fī ʿilm al-Jadal, this paper adopts the decolonial option of ‘epistemic disobedience’ in raising the question of whether juridical dialectic should earn its place in contemporary endeavors at studying ‘theory’ in the Arab-Islamic tradition. In terms of a future planetary theory, there must be a place for the religious to counter the entrenched presence of western theology in western ‘theory’.