Someone asked for 5 key takeaways, so after perusing my notes, here they are:
1. The nation state is a product of the enlightenment and therefore Euro-American in origins and its primary obsession is to use knowledge and nature to achieve control and domination. Think of how academic research and science is primarily for the purpose of how we can exploit and dominate nature more to bring it under more of our control. NASA wants to build a base on the moon while a very decent percentage of the lands the West colonised are living in poverty.
Even many of the problems the research attempts to solve are problems the state itself created in the journey of exploitation.
2. The relegation of the moral imperative to a secondary status and it's being largely divorced from science, economics, law and much else has been at the core of the modern project, leading us to promote or ignore poverty as both the legal and political are entirely connected to power and domination. This is the Is/Ought dichotomy or Facts/Values dichotomy that I will explain in the YouTube video. In Islamic governance, the rule of law is Shari'ah, and it works the other way around; the morality and values create the legal.
3. The legislative branch (parliament in the UK) is meant to be the only one creating the law, in reality, the executive (government) and judicial (courts) are also creating law arbitrarily. It's a mess.
4. In Islamic governance, neither the courts (judicial) nor the sultan (executive) create law, rather the jurists would DISCOVER the law of Allah (legislative). The jurists would be from the community of the courts itself, so therefore it has a stronger claim to being a bottom up system than the nation state does. Hallaq expands on the role of the "Mufti" in discovering law and the indispensability of the Mufti to the Shari'ah courts in his "Authority, Continuity and Change".
5. We are behaving and thinking exactly how the state wants us to think. We are "subjects" fashioned by the state for the state. This is done through education, media, etc. Think "British Values" plastered all over our school walls and how the terrorist in our movies is almost always a Muslim.
The whole TLDR of the book can be summed up in one verse of the Qur'an which so succinctly describes the problem with the nation-state:
أفرأيت من اتخذ إله هواه وأضله الله على علم وختم على سمعه وقلبه وجعل على بصره غشاوة
The 'Hawa' (desire) of the nation state could be dominance and control. This is the God of the nation state; I.e. itself. It has made itself and the dominance of itself its God. The 'Ilm' could be its science, laws and economic structures. Its 'Dalal' could be how its obsession with simply domination and control and using all its knowledge for domination and control only makes it more immoral and oppressive. But it sees itself as the standard for everyone else; thus its ears, heart and eyes are closed.
The Impossible State by Wael Hallaq
Okay so I know I'm late to the party but Alhamdulillah I'm about 10 pages away from finishing Hallaq's "The Impossible State" with copious amounts of notes.
While reading a 170 page book might not seem like a massive feat, this book is actually quite a challenging read. As I come from a traditional background and with no background in political science, I found this book incredibly beneficial. Despite having read quite a few academic books, this book was harder than any of Hallaq's other books that I have read, it should be firmly placed in the non-fiction segment of the non-fiction section of the library! ;)
I hope to make a PPT presentation and potentially present it in a Masjid in a simplified manner. May help to rid the inferiority complex some of our fellow Muslim brothers and sisters feel.