Kooria’s highly innovative study proffers a battery of concepts that would inspire future studies on Islamic law in areas relatively neglected by most experts of the Muslim civilization.
Islamic Law in Circulation is destined to be a classic. Divided neatly into eight chapters and laced with semi-fictional accounts detailing the journeys of a coterie of Islamic figures, this highly innovative study proffers a battery of concepts that would inspire future studies on Islamic law in areas relatively neglected by most experts of the Muslim civilization. Utilizing a fresh approach christened as “textual longue durée,” Mahmood Kooria examines the canonization and globalization of Shafi’ite law within the Indian Ocean region from the thirteenth century till the present. There were, in Kooria’s postulation, a number of intertwining forces that enabled the predominance of Shafiʿite law from Mecca to Malacca. Foremost were maritime networks that made possible for things to travel with texts. Scholars, students, and missionaries traversing back and forth from the heartlands of Islam and into the edges of the Muslim world provided innovative renderings of their school of jurisprudence (madhab) in the bid to spread and preserve Islam. These renditions became “textual cords” that moved alongside the maritime thoroughfares of the Middle East, Africa, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. A Shafiʿi cosmopolis of texts and ideas was invented and sustained, cemented as it was by the state imposition of what seemed to them to be the most comprehensive legal code in congruent with local cultures. From Kooria’s vantage point, such a cosmopolis continued to have “significant implications for the prevailing legal, literary, cultural and social communities of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia and the Americas, sending out waves of legalistic interactions across time and space (p. 373).”
It would take perhaps several lifetimes to narrate the massive corpus of works that shaped the career of Shafiʿite law in the Indian Ocean. Kooria flashes out a few highly-influential treatises that became staples for educational institutions and scholarly communities. These texts were a mixture of “legal manuals, commentaries, glosses, marginalia and translations (p. 26).” He masterfully examines these texts, comparing them against cognate texts and situating them within the ambit of connected Muslim contexts. When placed against the larger canvass of biographical or hagiographical literature, inscriptions, travel accounts, trade records, and letters, the picture that emerges is that of formations and ruptures. Commentaries, auto-commentaries, super-commentaries, and translations may appear, at first sight, to be mere reiterations, if not, extensions of an established Shafi’ism. But the story is much more complex than that. Kooria demonstrates that dynamic engagements with specific texts through the agency of the fuqaha (Islamic jurists) gave birth to different “textual families” within the larger Shafi’ite juridical complex. Tanqih, Tanbih, Muhaddab, Wasit, Ghaya, Minhaj and Fath were among the established textual families. Most textual families eventually faded into oblivion when patronage from rulers and state-sponsored ulama withered and commentaries dissipated (Chapter 3).
The title of the book seems larger than what it actually delivers. Kooria’s main analytical focus rests primarily around one textual family; the Minhaj. Tracing its origins to the iconic work of Yahya bin Sharaf al-Nawawi (1233–1277) entitled Minhaj al-Talibin, this textual family gained prominence in the Eastern Mediterranean and found its way into the courts of kings and intellectual hubs across the Indian Ocean for over a millennium. In truth, Minhaj’s popularity and unremitting significance laid in its author’s acute ability to synthesize diverse opinions within the Shafi’ite school of law. A man committed to the cause of the people and divine truth, Al-Nawawi presented his magnum opus in a manner that was suited for both pedagogical and juridical purposes. His austere piety, legendary courage, and staunch independence from the pressures of worldly power, according to Kooria, gave added clout to what could have been just another Shafi’ite-inspired commentary. The reverence that his intellectual descendants had towards him, and the force of his arguments generated global circulations of Nawawi’s tome. Indeed, scores of commentaries and translations in the image of the Minhaj were produced following author’s passing (Chapter 4).
In Chapters 5-7, Kooria brings into sharp relief key works that canonized the Minhaj and that made it an archetypal text by interpretive communities in the Indian ocean region. The Tuhfa al-Muhtaj of Ibn Hajar al-Haytami (1504-1567), the Fath al-Mu’in of Ahmad Zayn al-Din (1524-1583), the Nihayat al-zayn by Nawawi al-Bantani (1813-1898) and I’anat al-talibin of Sayyid Abu Bakr Shata al-Dimyati (1850-1893) were among the books within the Minhaji family that gained wide-ranging import. Kooria’s selection of texts may appear problematic to some, as writers such as al-Bantani did not actually write nor reside in Southeast Asia but spent much of his life in Mecca. He was a Meccan in all sense of that word. To his defense, Kooria illustrates that the impact of al-Bantani had in fact transcended his chosen domicile. Generations of students and pilgrims from Southeast Asia that studied with Al-Bantani circulated, commented, and translated his text into their home languages. They amplified al-Bantani’s classic into a primer for Islamic law in that part of the Muslim world.
More crucially, the four mentioned works provided a variety of elucidations of the Minhaj. They were coloured with autobiographical reflections, customary inclinations, political positionings, polemics between Muslims and non-Muslims, and intellectual contestations between Shafi’ites and between scholars from other schools of Islamic law. In the Tuhfa, Kooria writes, one would find Ibn Ḥajar claiming “the superiority of a Hijazi-Arab identity and asserts himself into this spectrum, despite the fact that he and his immediate ancestors were born and brought up in Egypt (p. 195).” The Malabari Ahmad Zayn, in turn, “changes the traditional Shafiʿi narrative to cater for the immediate contexts of the ongoing wars as he recognises the Hindu ruler as a legitimate sultan in the Islamic legal framework, with the ability to arbitrate in the juridical affairs of Muslims and to appoint qadis (p. 250).” The Southeast Asian al-Bantani and his Cairene contemporary al-Dimyati used their commentaries to censure the backwardness of the ulama, the decadence of Muslim rulers, and the oppressiveness of western colonialism. The anxieties which these last two scholars shared and their common intellectual heritage paved way for a geo-legal synthesis. With the advent of print capitalism and advances in travel, hybridized Meccan-Cairene Shafi’ite legal commentaries become more widely circulated and adopted by the oceanic communities (Chapter 7).
Islamic Law in Circulation closes with an examination of translations of the Minhaj and its commentaries written in Afrasian and European languages. Kooria seems to be on weaker ground here given his lack of acquaintance with some European languages. Still, he convincingly argues that for the Afro-Asian scholars, translations were more than mere word by word glosses. Translations were imbued with vernacular idioms to keep the long-held Shafi’ite school of law relevant in temporalities far away from where it was founded and codified. For the Europeans, however, translations were scarcely motivated by scholarly intents. Echoing Edward Said, Kooria explains that European orientalist scholarship was mostly spurred by contempt towards Islamic law. Their penultimate aim was to provincialize Islamic legal codes from the overall governance of Muslim life. “Translation thus is not an innocuous act of cultural mediation and production, but rather an ideological, political and oppressive event (p. 371).”
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it for all university courses on Islam. Imaginative, informative, and thought-provoking, it has set a new benchmark for studies on the history of Islamic law and Muslim textual traditions. Gems to be found at every page, this is a brilliant read written by an erudite scholar of Islam.
Khairudin Aljunied
Khairudin Aljunied (PhD SOAS, London) is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore and Senior Fellow. He was appointed as Professor and Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia, at the Alwaleed Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University and as a visiting professor at Columbia University, USA (Fulbright Program) in 2013 and University of Brunei Darussalam in 2022-2023. A recognized specialist in the field of intellectual history, his research focuses on the connections between Southeast Asia and Global Islam. Recent publications include Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Southeast Asian Islam in Comparative Perspective (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Hamka and Islam: Cosmopolitan Reform in the Malay World (Cornell University Press, 2018), Islam in Malaysia: An Entwined History (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Shapers of Islam in Southeast Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).