The Politics of Islamic Law

Entangled Empire: Religion and the Transnational History of Pakistan and Israel

“…21 By adding the entangled politics of religion to the analysis of colonial cultural technologies and techniques of classification, the article contributes to the study of trans-imperial history and the imperial sociology of knowledge. 22 In analysing the afterlife of colonial epistemologies in the cognate concepts of culture and religion, I also add to the scholarship of colonial, post-colonial and decolonial politics in the field of IR. 23 Finally, this article joins the growing body of literature that pieces together the unlikely entanglements in the histories of South Asia and the Middle East.…”

“…The efforts to govern Bengal also further laid the groundwork for the British understanding of Muslim governance and the 'manner in which Islam might be handled by the British Empire' elsewhere. 53 The All-India Muslim League was founded a year after the Bengali partition, while in 1909 the Indian Councils Act (also known as the Morley-Minto reforms) created exclusively Muslim electorates in provincial and central legislative councils. The provisions, defined as protections for religious minorities, were developed and embedded in the Indian political system through both the Montague-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 and the new constitutional framework developed in the 1935 Government of India Act.…”

“…First, they set the stage for the claims that could be made to or against state power. Any access to the rights and privileges provided by the state required a provisional acceptance of the terms of legibility set by the state, 'and this increasingly meant appealing to the state in terms of community identity', 55 in our cases, religious identity. In order to present alternatives or challenges to British power in India, actors would have to identify according to state categories to be recognised as challenging its policies.…”

Juridical Pan-Islam at the Height of Empire

“…Her case study of the Malayan state of Johor is a remark able exam ple of transmadhab his tory where the Otto man Mecelle (Hanafibased) was imported by the Johor rul ing elite to be the basis of Islamic law in the state, which has a Shafi'i major ity. 4 By dem on strat ing how the layering of mul ti ple sys tems of law con sti tutes the cre a tion of an entirely new legal sys tem rather that an agre ga tion of sep a rate strands, her work speaks directly to the case of Afghanistan as well. Both polit i cal enti ties emerged at the same time, and both decid edly did not absorb laws and legal mod els they encoun tered but rather con sciously and skill fully emu lated them.…”

“…It should not come as a sur prise that diff er ent sets of law under legal plu ral ism did not add up to a whole, pri mar ily due to many fac tors such as the iden ti ties of inter est groups lob by ing for power, which resulted in the mar gin al i za tion of cer tain soci e ties from the legal frame work at any point in time. 5 Although Ahmed rightly points out that "tribal and cus tom ary law" has been the focus of study thus far, his book tells the story of state's devel op ment of Islamic law that is bound to exclude cer tain ele ments, and lin e ages (13). It is a chal lenge to sus tain legal diver sity even when one wants to.…”