In The Politics of Islamic Law political scientist Iza Hussin offers a genealogy of contemporary Islamic law, a political analysis of elite negotiations over religion, state, and society in the British colonial period, and a history of current Muslim approaches to law, state, and identity. Hussin argues that Islamic law as it is legislated and debated throughout the Muslim world today is no longer theshari’ah as it previously existed. She shows that shari’ah—an uncodified and locally administered set of legal institutions and laws with wide-ranging jurisdiction—was transformed (not eradicated as some have argued) during the British colonial period into a codified, state-centered system with jurisdiction largely limited to law regarding family, personal status, ethnic identity, and the “private” domain. As a result, the practices, beliefs, and possibilities inherent in law, changed, and so did the strategies, attitudes and aspirations of those who used this changing system. Its present institutional forms, its substantive content, its symbolic vocabulary, and its relationship to state and society–in short, its politics–are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter, in struggles between local and colonial elites. The Politics of Islamic Law undertakes a cross-regional comparison of India, Malaya, and Egypt which illustrates that Islamic law is a trans-global product shaped by local political networks. The rearrangement of the local elite combined with the new reach of the state made possible by colonial power gave local elites a vested interest in this twinning of the centrality of Islamic legitimacy and the marginalization of its legal content. These processes are traced through close examinations of debates over jurisdiction, the definition of Islamic law, and in turn the nature of the state. This work makes an important contribution to critical debates in comparative politics, history, legal anthropology, comparative law, and Islamic studies.
