Author: jaleel

Since its establishment in 2014, the Alagil chair has been collaborating with researchers, affiliates and students to build up archives of primary materials in the field of Arabia Asia studies. In view of providing access to many important but hitherto neglected indigenous sources in the field, the chair digitized many manuscripts and documents in private hands, mosque libraries, institutions and other unnoticed locations in various regions of Arabia and Asia. Unsurprisingly, we found rich troves of history in such places that lay out of the way of the global arteries of major cities and jet routes but were once historically connected to distant regions through the sea and across the deserts and mountain passes. We also conduct ethnographic field research, collect materials and record inscriptions in tombs monuments and mosques.

We collaborated with local historians, students, descendants of important scholarly families, religious notables, institutions and diasporas who engaged as interlocutors of transregional connections in Arabia Asia matrix. Thus, we attempt to build regional capacity by enabling local enthusiasts and scholars to develop archives, equipment, skill and academic credentials. Such approaches are necessary as the wealth of materials produced through centuries of Arabia Asia interactions was not well captured by the colonial administration and as such do not largely show up in the major metropolitan archives.

During the past years, we covered important places in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Southern Arabia and Hejaz. The Maluku region was one of the important places were Tiar Hatta concentrated his archival project in Indonesia basing three historical locations; Ternate, Ambon and Geser. While the Ternate was an important place where Arab and Chinese traders met largely, Ambon was the Dutch base for the Spice Islands. The Seram island also hosts diverse migrants including Arabs, Chinese and Bugis diasporic communities and provides rich sources for understanding the Arabia Asia connections.

We are endeavoring to make significant manuscript copies available to the scholarly community.

ARABIA ASIA TRANSREGIONAL STUDIES ROUNDTABLE

The third Arabia Asia Transregional Studies Roundtable discussed the fascinating book, Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya, Cambridge University Press 2020 by Teren Sevea on 20 March 2024 @ 21.30 SGT.

The Arabia Asia Transregional Studies Roundtable Series, organized by the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Chair, meets to discuss challenges and solutions in research and publishing on all aspects of Arabia Asia relations. While the potentially large spatial and temporal dimensions of such relations pose challenges in framing research and narrating findings, we now have a number of methodologically innovative books and projects creatively building this field with all manner of empirical materials. And there is more to be done! The third roundtable will focus on the book, Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Taps and Guns in Islamic Malaya, by Teren Sevea. His ground-breaking study unravels the significance of Islamic miracle workers (pawangs) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Malay world, locating them in the spiritual economy of the Indian Ocean. Examining the connections between miracles and material life, Sevea explains how the production and extraction of natural resources, as well as the uses of technologies, were intertwined with the knowledge of charismatic religious figures. For registration: ARABIA ASIA TRANSREGIONAL STUDIES ROUNDTABLE SERIES – Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya » Asia Research Institute, NUS

“Thinking about law and debt, too, forced me to contend with the question of who the agents of legal history were, in both the commercial spaces of the Indian Ocean and within the jurisdictions that the British Empire established for itself in the region.” Fahad Bishara on his scholarly journey to the book, A Sea of Debt.

I didn’t set out to write a legal history of debt in the Indian Ocean. When I first conceived of the project that would become A Sea of Debt, I wanted to write about trade networks in the Indian Ocean, trust, and how commercial matters played out in British courtrooms around the region. I was interested in the dynamics of merchant networks, and I had hoped to be able to explore some of them through the letters that merchants exchanged with one another. The problem, however, was that I never found the letters (and assumed, incorrectly, that too few had survived). As I went from one merchant family collection to another, I kept searching (it turns out, in the wrong places) for correspondence, but all I could turn up were contracts – first tens of them, then hundreds, and eventually thousands. At some point I had to abandon the merchant networks project and had to reconceive it based on what I did have: reams and reams of debt contracts, which they simply called waraqas, or paper.

What first felt like an unmitigated catastrophe turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. Faced with an unexpected cache of mercantile paper, I had to reimagine how we might write histories of commerce in the Indian Ocean. And instead of constraining myself with abstract ideas like “networks” I had to train my focus on what I actually had in front of me – concrete material artifacts produced during the act of exchange that people felt were important enough to hold onto for more than a hundred years.

The contracts drew me to the law, but not in a way that I had expected to be. I had understood legal history to principally be an Anglo-American field. There were some exceptions, of course, but the bulk of the literature focused on the genealogies of different legal doctrines in the United States; those who were more inclined towards law and society also did excellent work on legal disputes, but principally in an American context. It was not clear what room there was for someone working on the Indian Ocean to include themselves in that conversation. On the other side of the corridor was the literature on Islamic legal history, which focused principally on specific ‘ulama and (mostly medieval) texts, or would take a concept like crime or reasonable doubt and trace it through a set of (again, mostly medieval) texts. In thinking about a socially-grounded history of law in Muslim society, I felt like I had few lifelines: reading Brinkley Messick’s The Calligraphic State was a watershed moment for me, but really, I had to find my inspiration elsewhere.

I was lucky. As I began writing my dissertation, I found myself in the company of a number of outstanding historians, all of whom were thinking about law in South Asia and the Indian Ocean in new and exciting ways: Mitra Sharafi, Rohit De, Mitch Fraas, Julia Stephens, Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Iza Hussin, Renisa Mawani, and others, all were writing legal histories around the Indian Ocean world that emphasized legal practice over doctrine and wove together questions of empire, state, and society in ways that rivaled (and indeed surpassed) the best works in American legal history. Through them I could see the possibility for a project that brought together questions of law and commerce in the Indian Ocean that anchored itself in specific materials, concepts, and practices. And as the dissertation slowly took the shape of a book, I came to learn of (and learn from) many others as well. The study of law, I came to appreciate, was much more than just doctrines and decisions and landmark cases that I knew little about. Law was woven into the fabric of society, economy, and politics; it was practically everywhere, and it was virtually impossible to ignore.

In A Sea of Debt, I grappled with the implications of this approach to doing legal history for the history of the Indian Ocean. As a legal concept, debt opened up doors for thinking about questions of personhood and property rights around the Indian Ocean. It allowed me to see how legal concepts were embedded in everyday contracting and documentation, and opened up the possibility to talk about a history of legal practice that was informed by (but, importantly, not constrained by) doctrine. It allowed for the possibility of an intercourse between legal ideas and legal practices – a process in which each was trying to move in the direction of the other. The distinction between “law in the books” and “law in action” was less clear than I had initially thought, and the dialogue between them was far more dynamic than I could have imagined.

Thinking about law and debt, too, forced me to contend with the question of who the agents of legal history were, in both the commercial spaces of the Indian Ocean and within the jurisdictions that the British Empire established for itself in the region. There were some obvious answers: jurists, qadis, and British judges, all of whom left an enormous paper trail in their wake. But in A Sea of Debt, there were other, less obvious protagonists as well: the katibs, or scribes, who mediated between the world of doctrine and practice in everyday commercial settings, and whose authorship underpinned virtually every transaction in this world. There were also the merchants themselves, many of whom posed questions on commerce to jurists, and who experimented with different forms of contracting in response to the demands of a changing market economy. And on the British imperial side of things, there were lawyers – scores of Indian and British lawyers who made their way into East Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose claim-making in the courtroom and invocation of British Indian law helped forge new pathways for thinking about economy and society, and even Islamic law, in the region.

Law opened up the possibility for thinking about new forms of connection in the Indian Ocean, and new frontiers between theory and practice. But also opened up new points of tension to think through. Commerce was not always a kind game; the circulations that it engendered also brought with them frictions and fissures. As different legal actors crafted the framework for transregional commercial activity to take place, they also had to contend with the moments of rupture that would inevitably come – the courtroom battles and competing claims about credit, debt, law, and empire that actors voiced as they fought over money and property they felt they were owed. When we read these histories from the courtroom, we see the ways in which macro-level events and transformations – wars, crises, global economic downturns – reverberated at the micro level.

In a past life, I called the waraqas I worked on in A Sea of Debt narrative flotation devices (or something like that), by way of signaling how they allowed me to move between the coasts of Arabia and East Africa, and between the realms of legal thought and practice. But in truth, they allowed me to do much more. By focusing on waraqas, I managed to see the macro in the micro – to see how large-scale concepts and processes played out in everyday settings. By reading about the contestations around the waraqa, I could see how everyday people thought about the processes they engaged in. And by thinking through the material artifacts that actors drew up and exchanged in their transactions with one another, I was able to move away from abstractions like “networks” and see new histories of law and economic life play out, on the ground and across the water, in a transregional arena.

Fahad Ahmad Bishara

Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Associate Professor of History and of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world, and has written a number of articles on the topic, along with his book A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is currently at work on a connected history of the Gulf and Indian Ocean told through the voyages of a Kuwaiti dhow in the early 20^th century.

“Perhaps this is true of any book, but Margins of the Market took a rather circuitous route from a dissertation proposal to a published book. The themes and questions at the center of the project were profoundly transformed over the course of researching, writing, rewriting, and arguably took on new meanings even after the text was etched between covers.” 

The dissertation began with my interest in the cultural processes of globalization. I belong to a community in India known as “Syrian Christians,” who trace their lineage back two millennia to the conversion of trading communities in what is today Kerala by early Jewish-Christian converts from the Levant. This ancestry made me interested a much longer history of globalization than was usually acknowledged in the public discourse. But any ancestral connections to the Middle East paled in comparison to my childhood spent in the strange expatriate bubbles of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I attended an American International school, and my friends at school and in the walled compound in which we lived, were from every corner of the globe. My parents had grown up in different corners of India and my cousins and relatives were similarly spread across North America, Africa, and Asia. We had a housekeeper and caregiver from Eritrea, and the language we spoke at home was English. I did not grow up with any sense of an autochthonous culture or national identity. A globalized world was a given for me, and I wanted to understand why.

So my initial dissertation proposal and the first months of my research concerned cultural histories of globalization, particularly the links between Western India and Oman. Having had only a minimal exposure to Arabic in the expatriate life of Riyadh, I spent years before and during graduate school studying the language in Yemen, Egypt, and classrooms in the U.S. and U.K. I assiduously collected any materials I could find in Arabic and hoped to subject them to the kinds of close literary analysis that were in vogue in history departments in the late 2000s. I was working towards an understanding of different modes of mercantile correspondence and the peculiar structures of the al-Bu Sa’idi dynasty’s rule in Oman under the heavy hand of British-Indian gunboat diplomacy.

But as I pursued this work, the world was changing around me. The 2008 financial crisis and its long fallout forced many of us to pay attention to the economy and the structures of capitalism that had overturned our lives. The 1990s and early 2000s had seemed to herald the “End of History” or at least the “Clash of Civilizations” in which the debates over political economy had been replaced with cultural and religious conflicts. The Financial Crisis revealed that the apparent stability of the neoliberal world order was a mirage. The continuing reverberations of economic crisis and the persistent challenges of political economy across the globe eventually filtered into the head of an insignificant graduate student buried in the archives.

I began to see moral and legal debates in the archives over the abolition of slavery as economic debates about the nature of labor. Political and military concerns over the arms trade became inflected with commercial considerations about the security of trade routes and property rights. The voluminous but mind-numbing statistics on trade, customs revenues and industrial production did not so much encapsulate the economy as serve to conceal intensive and extensive colonial interventions in commerce. The centrality of trade, finance and capitalism to the research I was undertaking, slowly dawned in the archives and progressively expanded as I completed the dissertation.

These interests only deepened when I began my first job, in which I was jointly appointed in a department of history and a wonderfully heterodox economics department. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst was an amazing place to think about capitalism in the wake of 2008. My Marxist, feminist and generally open-minded colleagues pushed me to think through the project in new ways and exposed me to new disciplinary literatures. Thanks to the SSRC’s Inter-Asia fellowship, I spent a year integrating East Africa into the book, rewriting the manuscript and submitting it for review.

By the time my book finally became incarnate as ink on paper, I felt a strange sense of alienation. A part of my mind, my life, my labor was reified into text. This commodity was purchased and borrowed, read and interpreted, praised and critiqued, mostly without my awareness. This small commodity that circulates through different hands preserves typographical errors, historiographical omissions, and theoretical lacunae. There are many things that I would like to change, but cannot. It will always be a historical artifact of a young-ish scholar anxious to get tenure and wrestling with the crises endemic to capitalism.

My greatest satisfaction and most substantial regret about the book both emerge from the same source. As I was finishing my dissertation, there was a great deal of anxiety amongst my fellow graduate students that the “good” university presses were not interested in monographs about South Asia much less the Indian Ocean. So, I worked desperately to pare back and tone down my interest in various social theorists and scholarly debates. I was convinced that if the book was not published by a top press, I would not get tenure. So this book had to appeal to the broadest possible public, in order to gain the interest of editors. I purged the manuscript of long sentences and long paragraphs, of references to other books and other scholars, burying as much as possible in the footnotes. I simplified, over-simplified and simply dumbed-down many arguments to make the book accessible to a lay reader.

This was in many ways a great success. I have had numerous colleagues tell me that they assign parts of the book to undergraduates and that students really enjoy and engage with material. The book also seems to have found an audience beyond history departments and beyond scholars of the Indian Ocean and I find this breadth of engagement is quite heartening. However, I believe this breadth has come at the cost of a depth of impact. The reviews of my book were mixed at best, and I’m not sure how far the ideas and arguments have penetrated into the scholarship. I had made a point of cutting the introduction to a bare minimum, condemning my engagement with various theoretical and conceptual works to what I hoped would be a trail of breadcrumbs in the footnotes. But I should have known almost no one reads the footnotes! I fear that my effort to make ideas accessible is largely read as theoretical and conceptual shallowness.

But then again I don’t know, and will never know what most of the readers of this book actually think about it. It is in the nature of published work that it slowly and circuitously filters into an anonymous crowd. Sales and royalties provide a very incomplete and skewed metric of who, where and why someone might pick up this book and flip through its pages. The world changes a book as you write it, and when the book is finished, the world keeps changing: altering how and who reads it. Having alienated one’s labor and sold a part of yourself, the author must go on. I now invest my thoughts, ideas, obsessions, and experience into the production of a new book; yet another commodity whose journeys into the world I will never be able to follow.

Johan Mathew

Johan Mathew is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (UC Press, 2016) as well as articles in numerous journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, History Workshop Journal, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He is currently writing his second book, tentatively entitled, “Opiates of the Masses: A Biography of Human Capital.” This book uses the consumption of cannabis and opium as a prism through which we can understand how working people were treated as a species of human capital.

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.

ARABIA ASIA TRANSREGIONAL STUDIES ROUNDTABLE

Organized by the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Chair in Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

29 Aug @ 21.30 SGT

The second Arabia Asia Transregional Studies Roundtable hosted a book discussion:

What is Religious Authority? Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia. By Ismail Fajrie Alatas, Princeton University Press 2021.

The Roundtable Series meets to discuss challenges and solutions in research and publishing on all aspects of Arabia Asia relations. While the potentiallly large spatial and temporal dimensions of such relations pose challenges in framing research and narrating findings, we now have a number of methodologically innovative books and projects creatively building this field with all manner of empirical materials. And there is more to be done!

The second roundtable discussed the book, What is Religious Authority? Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia, by Ismail Alatas. His book redirects anthropological and historical questions on Islam as a locally embedded yet universal reality into Muslim authority and community. Pursuing prominent Bā ʿAlawis in Indonesia, Alatas explicates how religious authority and community are cultivated and how such processes serve as the sites for realization of the Prophetic traditions while remaining irreducibly local in concrete contexts.

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).

“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).