Islamic Law in Circulation

Abstract

Analysing the spread and survival of Islamic legal ideas and commentaries in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean littorals, Islamic Law in Circulation focuses on Shāfiʿīsm, one of the four Sunnī schools of Islamic law. It explores how certain texts shaped, transformed and influenced the juridical thoughts and lives of a significant community over a millennium in and between Asia, Africa and Europe. By examining the processes of the spread of legal texts and their roles in society, as well as thinking about how Afrasian Muslims responded to these new arrivals of thoughts and texts, Mahmood Kooria weaves together a narrative with the textual descendants from places such as Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Malabar, Java, Aceh and Zanzibar to tell a compelling story of how Islam contributed to the global history of law from the thirteenth to the twentieth century.

SKETCHING THE EARLY 20th CENTURY HIJAZ-JAWI ISLAMIC SCHOLARSHIP THROUGH THE COMMENTARY LITERATURE: A Preliminary Study on Muḥammad 'Ali al-Mālikī’s Inārat al-Dujā

“…85 On the other side, one should also aware of the Ottoman antagonistic policy toward traditional Islamic law in Mecca which eventually united traditional authorities to stand together. 86 Alongside the influx of Islamic reformism through the expansion of al-Manar and the latter emergence of Wahhabism in Mecca, the traditional haramayn circles remained at work through the traditional correspondence of Jawi students and their masters. The 19 th Century, according to Kooria, was a moment for the formation of a "traditionalist-legalistic block against contemporary developments in religious and political arenas" 87 in which "the whole traditional community united as a single body".…”

Epilogue: Asia as a Privileged Space of Inquiry in the Field of Islamic Studies

“…According to familiar understandings, such processes are largely unidirectional, reaching from the Middle East and especially Mecca and Medina -the historical, educational, and ritual heart of Islam -to the various peripheries, of which Asia is especially peripheral. More-recent scholarship has moved away from this paradigm, emphasizing the multi-directionality of transmission in the Arabic cosmopolis (Kooria 2022;Ricci 2011) and the Indian Ocean world (Ho 2006;Green 2015), as well as shifting understandings of what counts as center and periphery (Curtis 2023;Meyer 2023). Guangtian Ha's article shows how China, often considered separate from Islamicate southern Asia Henley and Wickramasinghe (2003), has also participated in this cosmopolitan culture, receiving texts and ideas from South and Southeast Asia, even if the symbolic center of authority continued to rest with Arabic and Persian.…”