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"Of all the studies of Anglo-Muhammadan law, this is the most innovative and illuminating. In shifting the scholarly gaze from how colonial authorities fashioned this law to how Muslim legal practitioners of varied backgrounds engaged with it, Sohaira Siddiqui transforms our understanding of Islamic legal thought and practice under colonial rule."--Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of
Islam in Pakistan: A History "This is the best book on Islamic law in South Asia in Western scholarship. Combining exceptionally sophisticated readings of Muslim scholarly texts with rigorous yet ingenious theorization of colonial power, Siddiqui fundamentally reorients our conception of the modern career of the Islamic legal tradition, in South Asia and beyond. A book of monumental significance that is as lyrically written as it is brilliant."--SherAli Tareen, author of
Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire "Siddiqui offers the first in-depth study of the crucial role that Indian Muslim lawyers, judges, and jurists played in shaping the colonial administration of Islamic law. Through penetrating analysis across multiple languages and genres, she shows how these figures interwove colonial and Islamic epistemologies in ways that remain deeply relevant today."--Julia Stephens, author of
Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia
About the author
Sohaira Z. M. Siddiqui is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. She is author of Law and Politics under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni and editor of Locating the Sharia.
Summary
Prior to the East India Company’s arrival in India in 1661, Islamic law was widely applied in India by the Mughal Empire. As the Company’s power grew, it established a court system intended to limit Islamic law. Following the Great Rebellion of 1857, the project of jural colonization replaced the decentralized Islamic legal system with a new standardized system. Islamic Law on Trial interrogates the project of juridical colonization and demonstrates that alongside, and despite, the violent displacement of Muslim legal sovereignty, Muslims were able to engage with and even champion Islamic law from inside the colonial judiciary. The outcome of their work was a paradoxical legal terrain that appeared legitimate both to Muslim practitioners and English colonizers. Through this story of courtroom contestations, Sohaira Siddiqui challenges long-standing assumptions about Islamic law under British rule, the ways in which colonial power displaced pre-existing traditions, and how local elites navigated the new institutions imposed upon them.
