I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a post circulated by Iranian musicians and cultural activists responding to the flogging sentence imposed on Parastoo Ahmadi, and what struck me was not the legal formulation of the statement nor its political framing, but a sentence that refused to settle into any category, a sentence that suspended classification itself by insisting that this punishment is neither about women nor about singing but concerns all of us, and it is precisely in this suspension of determinacy that law ceases to appear as a stable system and begins to reveal itself as a form of searching. Law becomes a structure that no longer knows its object and therefore expands across life in order to stabilize its own uncertainty. From that moment I began to understand law not as a closed architecture of norms but as a dispersed field of circulation, where fragments of speech, images of punishment, and digital reactions move faster than their justification. It is within this instability that thinking itself must begin, because a philosopher of law today cannot begin from institutional distance or conceptual stability, but must begin from wandering, from moving through streets, feeds, conversations, kitchens, and gatherings without immediately converting them into fixed categories, because meaning does not precede these movements but emerges within them as an effect of exposure rather than analysis.

This is also why I insist that the researcher of law must be understood as a conceptual stalker, not in the sense of intrusion but in the sense of epistemic persistence, a refusal of distance that treats knowledge not as observation but as sustained following, a continuous return to unstable traces of legal life, because law itself behaves in a similarly intrusive way toward society, attaching itself to gestures, voices, and forms of existence that are not originally legible as legal objects, and therefore the only adequate response is to mirror this movement rather than to stand outside it. It is from this methodological condition that the case of Parastoo Ahmadi becomes intelligible not as an isolated legal decision but as a symptom of a deeper structural transformation, namely the transformation of law from a system of governance into a system of appropriation, and here the question is not simply about abuse or misapplication, but about a conceptual drift in the very foundation of authority, where governing begins to resemble owning, and jurisdiction loses its internal boundary, not because law disappears, but because it can no longer recognize its own limit. At the center of this transformation stands Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, whose political and theological writings provide a decisive conceptual architecture for understanding authority not as possession but as trust, and whose thought becomes crucial precisely because it does not eliminate political power, but rather intensifies its conditionality. In Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk (Counsel for Kings), traditionally attributed to al-Ghazali, the argument begins from a fundamental claim: political authority is necessary for the preservation of order, because without governance society collapses into conflict and injustice. Yet this necessity does not grant sovereignty in the sense of ownership; instead, it imposes responsibility. The ruler exists because order requires him, but he is not the owner of that order. He is inserted into it as a trustee whose legitimacy is entirely dependent on his fidelity to a burden that precedes him.

This is why al-Ghazali consistently frames political authority through the language of amānah (trust, entrusted responsibility), a term that carries within Islamic legal and theological thought a structural meaning that cannot be reduced to moral advice. A trust is not something that can be possessed; it is something that can only be carried under the condition of accountability. In al-Ghazali’s formulation, the ruler is an amīn (trustee, entrusted agent), and this status is not symbolic but juridical: it defines the ontological limit of political power. Authority is legitimate only insofar as it remains answerable to God, and therefore it is never self-grounding, never self-sufficient, and never convertible into ownership over those it governs. This becomes even more structurally explicit in al-Iqtiṣād fī al-Iʿtiqād (Moderation in Belief), where al-Ghazali situates political authority within a broader theological architecture of divine sovereignty. Here the Qur’anic horizon becomes decisive:

Indeed, God commands you to render trusts (entrusted responsibilities) to those to whom they are due.

—Qur’an 4:58

This verse does not merely prescribe ethical behavior; it defines the ontology of authority itself. Governance is not possession of power but the administration of a trust whose origin is not human. And this is reinforced by the verse that states:

To God belongs the dominion (absolute sovereignty) of the heavens and the earth.

—Qur’an 24:42

This establishes that ultimate ownership cannot be attributed to any human authority without violating the theological structure of sovereignty. Within this framework, al-Ghazali constructs a very precise legal-philosophical constraint: political authority is necessary, but it is never complete. It is operative, but not autonomous; functional, but not self-legitimating; powerful, but never possessive. The ruler may exercise coercion, but coercion does not transform him into an owner, because ownership is structurally excluded by the theological condition that all dominion ultimately belongs to God. What al-Ghazali therefore produces is not merely a theory of just rule, but a theory of constitutive limitation: authority is only intelligible as long as it remains structurally incapable of becoming ownership.

This is why al-Ghazali’s thought becomes decisive for the philosophy of law that emerges here, because it allows us to formulate a principle that is not merely ethical but structural: authority is defined by what it cannot become. It cannot become milk (ownership, possession). It cannot transform human beings into property. And this impossibility is not external to law but internal to its intelligibility. Once authority crosses this threshold, it ceases to function as governance and begins to function as appropriation. What makes this even more significant is that al-Ghazali does not treat this limitation as idealistic abstraction. In Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, he explicitly acknowledges the necessity of strong rulers, the inevitability of coercive power, and the reality of political violence. But even within this realism, he refuses to collapse necessity into legitimacy. Necessity explains why authority exists; it does not justify its transformation into ownership. The ruler remains accountable, and this accountability is not procedural but existential: it is anchored in the fear of divine judgment. Authority, therefore, is always shadowed by the possibility of its own illegitimacy before God. This is where the deeper philosophical consequence emerges: if authority is defined by accountability rather than possession, then it is structurally incomplete. It is always suspended between necessity and limitation, between function and prohibition, between governance and the impossibility of ownership. And it is precisely this suspension that prevents law from becoming a totalizing system. Law, in this classical Islamic theological-juridical imagination, is never total; it is always bounded by a horizon that it cannot appropriate. But the crisis that I call wandering law does not arise from the absence of this structure; it arises from its internal deformation. The problem is not that the distinction between trust and ownership disappears, but that trust itself begins to operate according to the logic of ownership. Wilāya (guardianship, authority as responsibility) does not vanish; it drifts. And this drift transforms law from a system of limitation into a system of expansion.

When this happens, the governed are no longer understood as participants in a shared normative order but as objects within an increasingly permeable field of intervention. Bodies become administrable, voices become administrable, expression becomes administrable, and even silence becomes administrable. This is not because authority has become more coherent, but because it has lost the internal distinction that al-Ghazali’s framework presupposes: the distinction between responsibility and possession. At this point law no longer asks what falls within its jurisdiction; it begins to ask what can still be captured by it. And this shift marks the transition from governance as limitation to governance as expansion. But expansion here should not be misunderstood as strength. A stable legal order does not need to expand indefinitely into life. It governs through boundaries. It knows what it cannot become. A wandering law expands precisely because it no longer knows where its limit is. From this perspective, the case of Parastoo Ahmadi is not primarily about a specific legal infraction but about the conditions under which voice itself becomes legible to law. When sound becomes punishable, when artistic expression becomes something that must be corrected through coercion, what is revealed is not the clarity of legal categories but their instability. Law begins to reach beyond conduct into existence itself, and in doing so reveals that it no longer operates within the boundaries that classical legal thought—especially in its Ghazalian articulation—requires. It is here that everyday life becomes philosophically decisive, because what law fails to register is not absence but unformatted presence. I think here of voices that circulate outside institutional frameworks: my mother speaking in the kitchen while cooking, my partner’s voice embedded in the rhythm of daily life, my aunt adjusting her tone depending on who is present. These are not marginal phenomena; they are forms of life that exist at the threshold of visibility. They are fully real, yet not fully legible to juridical abstraction. And it is precisely this gap that exposes the limitation of law as a system of recognition.

In the end, what emerges is not a critique of a single legal decision but a philosophical description of a condition in which law no longer knows what it governs yet continues to govern, no longer knows what it protects yet continues to punish, no longer knows its limits yet continues to expand. And in this condition, al-Ghazali’s thought returns not as historical reference but as structural warning: that authority is only intelligible as trust, and once it begins to behave as ownership, it ceases to be law in any meaningful sense and becomes a system of appropriation, marking the collapse of the very distinction upon which legal authority depends.