Questions around how we use concepts like “codification,” which were largely developed within Western legal thought, open up wider conversations about the shifting terrain of comparative legal analysis. Works like Kooria’s are pushing the field in new directions by incorporating much deeper analysis of non-Western legal traditions.
In his new book Islamic Law in Circulation Mahmood Kooria offers us a magisterial exploration of a web of Shafi’i texts and teachers that created a dynamic Islamic legal cosmopolis spanning the Indian Ocean. Quite unusually for a historian, the scope of his study is both broad ranging geographically and chronologically, extending from the thirteenth to twentieth century. While a number of scholars have pointed to Islamic law as a crucial lingua franca in the Indian Ocean, Kooria provides an original account of what this legal culture actually consisted of and how it bridged local and transregional contexts. He focuses in particular on the Shafi’i school of law, which predominates across coastal communities in Asia, Africa, and Arabia. Methodologically he navigates this vast space and time by focusing on the seminal text in the Shafi’i tradition, the Minhāj al-tālibīn, and how it circulated through a large corpus of commentaries and super-commentaries. The dynamic interaction between canonical text and commentaries allows for an interplay between unity and diversity in the tradition—which for Kooria emerges as a key feature of the Indian Ocean legal cosmopolis.
Throughout the book Kooria challenges an Arab-centric view of Islamic history to instead show how networks of influence across the Indian Ocean were multi-directional. In the book Asian and African scholars emerge as key contributors to the growth of the tradition, not just as recipients and agents of vernacularization, but as global players. To give just one example, he shows how Hadhrami scholar-merchants from Yemen, who have long been associated with the spread of the Shafi’i school, were just one among many groups that were involved in this circulation. By showing the critical roles also played by Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, Malays, Javanese, Sumatrans, Indians, Swahilis, Ethiopians, and Comorians, Kooria present a much more multi-directional network of exchange.
As someone who has worked primarily on Islamic law in the context of colonial India, a much more territorial and state-centered context, Islamic Law in Circulation was both refreshing and challenging. Even in my own work, I have found that studying Islamic law often requires setting aside Euro-centric conceptions of what constitutes law and how it operates. Within the Western legal tradition, the centrality of the state, or state-like institutions is almost taken for granted as a defining feature of what constitutes law. For me one of the most important lessons while working on my own book Governing Islam was the need to attend to how Islamic law operates beyond the state. This insight led me to look to nineteenth-century Urdu texts and informal spaces of adjudication as well as colonial courts. Kooria by focusing on an earlier period and an oceanic context takes this reorientation of how we conceive of law much further—and this is a seminal contribution. I therefore wanted to ask him to expand on how the different forms that law takes in this space and time necessitates the use of different legal concepts and methods, given that legal history remains a dominantly Eurocentric field.
More specifically, I was particularly intrigued by the ways in which Kooria uses the concepts of codification and canonization in his analysis of the thirteenth-century text Minhāj al-tālibīn. For context, in my own work I’ve resisted the idea of codification. I therefore found it striking to see Kooria use it in his—although I want to note at the outset, not necessarily in a bad way. For me, not using codification as a concept was crucial to emphasize that in British India Anglo-Muhammadan law was never formally codified and instead evolved through the accumulation of case law. In fact, religious laws in British India were left uncodified while other areas of law, such as the penal code, were compiled into codes. In India since independence the post-colonial state has codified aspects of Hindu law but largely avoided such moves with respect to Islamic law. I therefore think that describing Islamic law in colonial and post-colonial India as “codified” creates much confusion and stands in the way of more careful consideration of how the accumulation of case law operated in practice. When we look to the ongoing evolution of Islamic law beyond colonial courts and texts—a key focus of my own work and a theme also of Kooria’s final chapter—the idea of codification further unravels.
At a broader level, my motivation in arguing against codification in British India—which I’ll note has not always been a popular stance—is that I think it reinforces problematic binaries that draw comparisons between pre-modern Islamic and modern Western law by portraying them as polar opposites. In this formulation Islamic law before the colonial encounter was flexible, dynamic, and localized before colonial powers rigidified, stagnated, and standardized it. I’m suspicious that this framework flattens both our sense of Islamic law before and after colonialism by forcing historical comparisons into a framework organized around binary oppositions. I was therefore highly interested to see Kooria use the concept of codification for a text written in the thirteenth century and wanted to hear him speak more about his use of this concept.
At a larger level I think questions around how we use concepts like “codification,” which were largely developed within Western legal thought, open up wider conversations about the shifting terrain of comparative legal analysis. Works like Kooria’s are pushing the field in new directions by incorporating much deeper analysis of non-Western legal traditions. I wonder if Kooria can speak to the balance between adapting analytical concepts, like codification as well as canonization, versus attempting to engage in what some scholars might call theorizing from the Global South. In his work, for example, this might mean thinking about what terms Islamic jurists used to describe the work done by a text like Minhaj. We might then consider how these various terms, both from Islamic and Western legal traditions, apply more broadly to thinking about continuity and change in different legal contexts. But I am also open to using a text like Minhaj to shift how we use the term codification, and how we think about its chronologies and geographies beyond Eurocentric genealogies. I understand that Kooria is currently pursuing elements of this work through an ongoing collaborative project with colleagues at the University of Bergen. In a way this would also complement my own efforts to resist a binary framing of Islamic law before and after colonialism. In short, I mean these comments as an opening for Kooria to share more about his thoughts on the rapidly evolving field of connective and comparative legal history—to which his book makes a very exciting contribution.
Julia Stephens
Julia Stephens is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research focuses on how law has shaped religion, family, and economy in colonial and post-colonial South Asia and in the wider Indian diaspora. Her first book, Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is currently spending a year as a Humanities Research Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi, where she is working on a book entitled Worldly Afterlives: Family and Legacy-Making in the Indian Ocean.