Observing and participating in Muslim conversations on Islamic law through a decolonial lens led me to see that debate as misplaced and reflective of a colonial obsession with ontology as the site of truth, whether in symbol or in social practice. That is, the debate assumes Islamic law “is” something that can be located either within cultural symbols or in a mode of cultural practice. But I did not find that same obsession with ontology in the conversations I was following. The driving concern in those discussions—rarely, if ever, expressed—is: how does one do Islamic law? And the answers to that question have very little to do with either textual records or observed practice. Rather, the virtue of Islamic law for a segment of believers I call fiqh-minded is found in making rhetorical arguments within an ancestral tradition that is both internally consistent and contextually relevant, whether or not that argument is found in either ancient texts or lived practice. In this framework, Islamic law functions through a salvific language that expresses the speaker’s ideas about ideal human activity, and speaking that language is itself the value. For fiqh-minded Muslims, the value of Islamic law and legal arguments is neither in the ontological referent of a legal proposition nor in the phenomenological, but in the rhetorical formation of an argument rooted in a historical tradition that provides meaning for contemporary believers.