Arabia Asia Relations Connections Networks Alagil Chair Engseng Ho ARI NUS

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

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.

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

The first Arabia Asia Transregional Studies Roundtable hosted a book discussion on 3 May 2023 @ 23.00 SGT:

Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi’i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. By Mahmood Kooria, Cambridge University Press 2022.

The videos of the virtual roundtable will be uploaded soon to the Alagil Arabia Asia (nus.edu.sg) blog.

To read a commentary of the book by Philipp Bruckmayr, see: Casting the Net Wide: Insights from a Major Transregional History of Islamic law, by Philipp Bruckmayr – Arabia-Asia (nus.edu.sg)

To know more about the activities of the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Chair in Arabia Asia Studies at ARI, NUS: https://blog.nus.edu.sg/alagilarabiaasia/

Codification and Canonization of Islamic Law: Comments by Julia Stephens

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.

Casting the Net Wide: Insights from a Major Transregional History of Islamic law, by Philipp Bruckmayr

“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).