Read more
This book explores the ways in which Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean world produced and shaped Islamic law and its texts, ideas and practices in their local, regional, imperial, national and transregional contexts.
With a focus on the production and transmission of Islamic law in the Indian Ocean, the chapters in this book draw from and add to recent discourses on the legal histories and anthropologies of the Indian Ocean rim as well as to the conversations on global Islamic circulations. By doing so, this book argues for the importance of Islamic legal thoughts and practices of the so-called "peripheries" to the core and kernel of Islamic traditions and the urgency of addressing their long-existing role in the making of the historical and human experience of the religion. Islamic law was and is not merely brought to, but also produced in the Indian Ocean world through constant and critical engagements. The book takes a long-term and transregional perspective for a better understanding of the ways in which the oceanic Muslims have historically developed their religious, juridical and intellectual traditions and continue to shape their lives within the frameworks of their religion.
Transregional and transdisciplinary in its approach, this book will be of interest to scholars of Islamic Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Legal History and Legal Anthropology, Area Studies of South and Southeast Asia and East Africa.
List of contents
Introduction
1. The Formation of Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean Littoral, c. 615-1000 CE
2. Legal Diglossia, Lexical Borrowing and Mixed Judicial Systems in Early Islamic Java and Sumatra
3. Borrowing Adat and Adopting Islam: The Mandarese Records on the Creation and Islamization of Adat in West Sulawesi
4. Sharīʿa Translated? Persian Documents in English Courts
5. Possibilities and pitfalls of cosmopolitanism: Two treaties from northern Somalia in the late nineteenth century
6. Islamic Legal Crossings and Debates in Cambodia: Evidence from fatāwā and French Colonial Archives in the Early 20th Century
7. The Interplay of Two Sharīʿa Penal Codes: A Case from Gayo Society, Indonesia
8. Post-colonial Nostalgia, Conspiracy Theories and Uneasy Quiescence: Muslim Newspaper Commentary on the Debate on Kadhis’ Courts in Contemporary Tanzania
About the author
Mahmood Kooria is affiliated with Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Ashoka University, India. He read his PhD at the Leiden University Institute for History in 2016 and is the author of Islamic Law in Circulation: Shāfiʿī Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (forthcoming) and co-editor of Malabar in the Indian Ocean World (2018).
Sanne Ravensbergen is a cultural historian of law and colonialism. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for History at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on mixed courts and the material culture of law making in nineteenth and twentieth century Indonesia.
Summary
This book explores the ways in which Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean world produced and shaped Islamic law and its texts, ideas and practices in their local, regional, imperial, national, and transregional contexts.
