“Islamic Law in Circulation greatly unsettles the still pervasive view of the perceived centuries-long stagnation of Islamic law after the development of the taqlīd al-madhhab regime in Sunni Islam.”
From among the many merits of Mahmood Kooria’s study, I will here only dwell upon a selected few. Firstly, Islamic Law in Circulation greatly unsettles the still pervasive view of the perceived centuries-long stagnation of Islamic law after the development of the taqlīd al-madhhab (i.e., confining oneself to the teachings, methods, and rulings of one’s own school of law) regime in Sunni Islam. Since the late 19th century, this narrative of stagnation has been firmly implanted in Western scholarship and in Muslim reformism, both in its modernist and Salafī shapes. A key argument conventionally adduced to “prove” this petrified state of Islamic law was the fact that commentaries and glosses rather than separate “original” works represented the prime medium of scholarly writings in the field in the so-called post-classical period. Even though ground-breaking works of Wael Hallaq, Khaled Abou El Fadl and Norbert Oberauer, among others, have shown that neither the practice of taqlīd, now no longer simply disparaged as unthinking blind emulation, nor the popularity of commentarial literature can be reduced to a process of intellectual stagnation or even decline. Much to the contrary, it has been shown how commentarial literature often served to update, enlarge, and diversify the contents of and perspectives on established texts. By focusing on one of the major clusters of Shāfiʿī law texts, with its huge number of subsidiary commentaries, super-commentaries, and translations, Kooria is therefore not completely breaking new ground. It can be rightfully said, however, that an enquiry into these still extremely understudied phenomena has so far never been pursued on such a large scale: that is, based on a textual tradition spanning hundreds of years and thousands of miles, as he studies writings from the 13th to the 20th century by authors from Arab lands, East Africa, South and Southeast Asia.
It is this refusal to privilege Arab contributions to the making of the Shāfiʿī world around the Indian Ocean rim, at the expense of those of scholars and Muslim realities in other regions, which lies at the root of the second major contribution of Islamic Law in Circulation, namely the provincializing of the study of the emergence of the Shāfiʿī school as the dominant madhhab in the Indian Ocean region. The work clearly shows that Shāfiʿī fiqh was pushed forward by the expansion of the school into new regions, especially once also local scholars in East Africa and South and Southeast Asia could make themselves heard in the increasingly polyphonic Shāfiʿī legal discourse. It was through the agency of such local scholars and their transregional connections that fresh perspectives and new issues were introduced into the wider Shāfiʿī legal mental map, thereby not only expanding it but also making it more suitable and relevant to Muslims in contexts vastly differing from that of Cairo, Mecca or even the Hadramawt.
A key example in this regard is Fatḥ al-Muʿīn by the South Indian 16th century scholar Zayn al-Dīn al-Malībārī. As Kooria shows, this text is strongly reflective of the author’s local context. It accepts the social and political reality of living under a Hindu king, by allowing the appointment of judges by non-Muslim rulers. In addition, it seeks to set guidelines for social interaction with a Hindu majority. Against this background, it could be regarded as a kind of early modern fiqh al-aqalliyāt (Islamic law of minorities), something assumed to have been developed only from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. Furthermore, al-Malībārī’s handbook includes discussions about tropical insects and the use of coconut palm leaves for roof-building in its sections on rules for ritual purity, just as it engages with the implications and legal consequences of the ritual and recreational consumption of betel nuts. Most significantly, this thematic expansion and refinement of Shāfiʿī legal discourse was not to be confined to the local audiences in the author’s native Malabar. As Fatḥ al-Muʿīn developed into a widely studied text across the whole expanse of the Indian Ocean rim as well as in scholarly centers of the Arab world, such as Cairo and Mecca, a reverse journey took place: Positions shaped by and formulated at the perceived periphery of the Shāfiʿī world were integrated into the overall tradition of the school. As a lasting monument of this process, Kooria presents and analyzes Iʿānat al-ṭālibīn, the extensive commentary to al-Malībārī’s work by the Egyptian Mecca-based late nineteenth century scholar Sayyid Bakrī.
By the time of Sayyid Bakrī, the Shāfiʿī edifice had become increasingly challenged by the different manifestations of the emerging Islamic reformist movement, most of which regarded the institution of the madhhab, and especially the practice of taqlīd, as an un-Islamic innovation and/or one of the main causes of perceived Muslim backwardness. As Kooria shows, this new challenge accelerated a closing of ranks within the school, bridging the historical gap between Cairene and Meccan strands of Shāfiʿī thought, which had already begun in the eighteenth century with figures such as Sulaymān al-Kurdī. In this regard, Islamic Law in Circulation is not only the first in-depth account of how the Shāfiʿī school came to dominate the Indian Ocean region, but also goes some way to explain how it was able to withstand the twin challenges of Western interference and reformist critique. Beyond the areas covered by Kooria, the Shāfiʿī school has also left a strong lasting imprint among the Muslims of Cambodia and Vietnam. Apart from the majority of Cambodian and Vietnamese Muslims, whose Islamic scholars were firmly integrated into the Southeast Asian regional and trans-regional Shāfiʿī educational networks by the nineteenth century, traces of Shāfiʿī doctrine are even found among those local Muslim communities, which have developed independent and highly localized Islamic traditions. Thus, Cambodia’s Kan Imam San community and Vietnam’s Cham Bani Muslims, both by now recognized as separate Islamic congregations in the respective states, still exhibit certain Shāfiʿī elements in their ritual practices and textual heritage.
Arguably, the last chapter in the story of Shāfiʿī ascendancy in the Indian Ocean region, and particularly in its Southeast Asian part, is a development already falling beyond the long-term analysis of Kooria’s marvelous book: the institutionalization of the school as the official madhhab in modern independent nation states. Thus, the Shāfiʿī madhhab is the official law school of Brunei and all Malaysian states, except Perlis. Therefore, the latter, which is incidentally ruled by a royal family of Hadrami-descent, one of the main groups credited for propagating the Shāfiʿī school in the region, is often denounced as Malaysia’s “Wahhabi state.” Of course, this moniker tells us more about the anxiousness of Malaysia’s religious bureaucracy and the sultans, who are functioning as the guardians of Islam and Malay custom in their respective states, in the face of challenges to state-defined Malay Islam than about the actual influence of Wahhabī/Salafī thought in Perlis. Nevertheless, it brings the strong association between adherence to the Shāfiʿī school and Malay Muslim identity into focus, which represents one specific legacy of the dynamics described in Islamic Law in Circulation. This view is further strengthened, if we are taking into account that this also applies to the Muslim minority context of Singapore. In the small Southeast Asian city-state, the two main components of the community – Malays and Muslim Tamils – are not only sharing a common law school. What is more, their Malay-dominated official representative body, the Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (Islamic Religious Council of Singapore), explicitly privileges the Shāfiʿī madhhab as its basis for legal opinions.
Philipp Bruckmayr
Philipp Bruckmayr is a Visiting Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Freiburg. He has held fellowships and lectureships at the International Research Center Cultural Studies (Vienna), Passau University, the National University of Malaysia, and the University of Exeter. He was awarded the Dissertation Prize of the German Association of Middle Eastern Studies (DAVO) in 2015 and the Dr. Hermann Stieglecker-Scholarship for Christian-Islamic Studies of the Forum of World Religions (FWR) in 2017. Much of his research has focused on Islam in Southeast Asia and its linkages to other regions of the Muslim world. His most recent publications include “Facing Mecca from Java: Two Treatises on the Establishment of the qibla, and Their Scholarly and Social Context” in Islamic Law and Society (2023).