Colonial and Post-Colonial Governance of Islam: Continuities and Ruptures (original) (raw)
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The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State: A Book Review The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State: A Book Review, 2019
Iza R. Hussin is a lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), the University of Cambridge. Her areas of research include religion, Islamic law, comparative politics, and society. Her book, The Politics of Islamic Law investigates the process of transformation of Islamic law by the British colonial administrators in India, Egypt, and Malaysia. The main argument of the book is about the process by which Islamic law was made, unmade and remade in colonized states as a result of interactions and negotiations between the British colonizers and the local political elites. She argues that the remaking and transformation of Islamic law produced a new version of Islamic law which was more state-centered and patriarchal than pre-colonial Islamic law, which was diverse, instance-based and judge-centric. She observes that Islamic law was marginalized through this process of transformation and confined to the limited domain of personal law and religious endowments (awqaf). Chapter I of the book focuses on the methodology and overall contour of the book. Subsequently, Chapter II discusses the radical transformation of Islamic law in terms of lawmaking and state-building processes in the colonial India, Egypt, and Malaysia. Chapter III of the book analyses the issue of the jurisdiction. The colonial administration assumed the jurisdiction over the matters of the religion through treaties like the Allahabad treaty, the Victorian Proclamation, the Hastings Plan, and the Pangkor Treaty. Chapter IV deals with the application of Islamic law in the trials. It discusses the four important trials namely the trial of Warren Hastings, the trial of Bahadur Shah, the trial of Perak chiefs of Malaysia, and the trial of Ahmed ‘Urabi of Egypt. After analysis of the trials in the colonized states, Chapter V addresses how colonizers remade the Muslim states through the institutionalization of Islamic law by the local elites. The central theme of this chapter is the struggle of the Muslim intellectuals and religious scholars to counter the marginalization of Islamic law. It also discusses how the state incorporated new discourses and institutions into Islamic law. The last two chapters of the book analyses postcolonial consequences of privatization, secularization and marginalization of Islamic law. Chapter VI discusses the colonial politics of Islamic law by focusing on secularism, Islamic law and the Muslim modernity. It also discusses legal formalism, legal pluralism and legal realism in the modern context. The last chapter addresses the contemporary politics of Islamic law. This chapter analyses the postcolonial problematics of centralization of Islamic law by referring to two Malaysian court cases (Lina Joy and Nyonya Tahir ) on the issue of apostasy.
Islamic Law and Society, 2018
In 1869, the British allowed Muslims to sit as judges on the High Court. This article explores the legal opinions of the first Muslim judge to be appointed to the High Court, Syed Mahmood. Straddling two competing worlds due to his English education coupled with his native loyalties, Justice Mahmood both legitimated and resisted colonial judicial power. In this essay I will demonstrate how British judges interpreted points of Islamic law within an English legal framework, and how these interpretations contradicted their own Anglo-Muhammad legal texts, yet became the foundation of legal precedents established through the doctrine of stare decisis. Despite participating within the British colonial judiciary, Mahmood challenged these precedents, demonstrating his ability to navigate the paradoxes of colonial power to secure for himself a legitimate platform from which he could argue his juridical interventions. The efficacy of these challenges, however, ultimately was restrained by the institutions and structures of the colonial jural project.
The Islamicate Adab Tradition vs. the Islamic Shari‘a, from Pre-Colonial to Colonial
The goal of this paper is to provide a bird’s eye view on what might qualify as ‘the mother of all distinctions’ within Islamicate history affecting the regulation of human conduct. It is a rather ‘soft’ distinction, whereby the ethical and literary tradition of adab works as an harmonious counterpoint, more than as a sheer alternative, to the normative discourse subsumed under the notion of shari‘a, the law originating from Divine will (shar‘). Adab does so, however, while clearly affirming a distinctive, non-divine (and in this sense ‘secular’) source of norms of human interaction. The paper is divided into two parts: the first delineates the traits of adab in pre-colonial times, while the second focuses on key transformations it underwent during the colonial era.
The academic theme of Islam and colonialism is controversial, vast and inexhaustive. With colonialism almost all over the Muslim world from the mid 19 th Century and the diverse impacts and implications it has on the colonized countries, it is understandable if views differ and diverge. In Africa, Central and Southeast Asia as in most neocolonial countries of the world, colonial legacies still replete as they endured to the contemporary times. The study of Islam and colonialism in Northern Nigeria is expectedly so partly because of the nature and substance of the British rule between 1897, when Ilorin emirate was conquered and 1960, when the then colonially formed Nigeria got her independence. Northern Nigeria is diverse though dynamic and colorful in terms of its people, culture and socio-material setting. As such, Muhammad S. Umar's narrowing the research to the intellectual responses of the Northern Nigeria Muslims to British colonial rule is a brilliant decision. This is not to say that such a task is a simple one. The outcome of this research engagement is largely a success.
A Sense of Justice: Coloniality and the Islamic Legal Tradition
Die Welt des Islams, 2024
This special issue presents a critical history of legal modernization and the “creative destruction”1 of the institutional apparatus of Islamic law. We offer not only comparative interventions but seek to better understand how the transplantation of secular legal orders was justified and maintained. This approach will enable the reader to appreciate the historical process—not merely the outcome—of creating alternative judicial orders and the impact of colonial legalities on legal institutions and their socio-political contexts. We start our inquiry from the premise that only by integrating the internal logic of Islamic legal institutions and indigenous practices can we understand the effects that colonial legalities have had on the development of law.
British policy towards religion in colonial Africa was influenced by its intrinsic value to the maintenance of a very strong administration over the continent and achieving the socio-economic objectives Britain set itself at the beginning of its colonization. The Benin Kingdom had been largely untouched by any world religion before the British conquered the Kingdom in 1897 and this conquest facilitated the penetration of Christianity and Islam therein. The failure of Christian missionaries to provide educational services compelled the government to establish a government school in 1901 for the production of its requisite personnel. The services provided by the Government School and the reliance on indigenous institutions under the indirect rule system of administration made missionaries and their education superfluous to the operation of the colonial government. Nevertheless, both Christians and Muslims introduced their own educational services. Though Islamic education was of less value to the colonial Administration and Muslims were an insignificant minority in Benin society, a policy had to be adopted towards the emergent Muslim population. This paper examines # Associate Professor at the of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat in Benin City for the warm reception and interviews. My final thanks go to the two anonymous reviewers for their criticism and suggestions.