Die bisherige Forschung geht davon aus, dass das islamische Recht von unabhängigen Juristen entwickelt wurde. Dabei sind mitunter Einflüsse aus fremden Rechtssystemen eingeräumt worden, doch eine gezielte Rezeption galt stets als ausgeschlossen. In einer Vergleichsanalyse, die auf der Prämisse einer massiven Interaktion der Kulturen in jener Zeit basiert, lässt sich nun nachweisen, dass das erste monumentale Rechtswerk im Islam, die Zāhir ar-riwāya des Šaybānī, strukturell und inhaltlich auf dem Rhēton beruht – einer griechischen Version jenes Regelwerkes, das später in Europa als Corpus Iuris Civilis Verbreitung fand. Inspiriert durch die byzantinische Reichsrechtsidee kodifizierten muslimische Staatsjuristen in Bagdad das islamische „Reichsrecht“, das aber angesichts der Opposition frommer Überlieferer durch Traditionen legitimiert werden musste. Nachdem sich das Reichsrecht in weiten Teilen des Kalifats etabliert hatte, bewirkte der revolutionäre Triumph der Orthodoxie Mitte des 9. Jahrhunderts dessen Übergang in ein Juristenrecht, das nun in den Händen unabhängiger Gelehrter lag.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But qazis and muftis, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere, they resisted the colonial state's authority over personal law and rejected legal codification by embracing flexibility and possibility. With postcards, letters, and telegrams, they made everyday Islamic law vibrant and resilient and challenged the hegemony of the Anglo-Indian legal system. Following these developments from the beginning of the Raj through independence, Elizabeth Lhost rejects narratives of stagnation and decline to show how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life, even beyond colonial courtrooms and the confines of family law. Lhost shows how ordinary Muslims shaped colonial legal life and how their diversity and difference have contributed to contemporary debates about religion, law, pluralism, and democracy in South Asia and beyond.

In The Politics of Islamic Law, Iza Hussin compares India, Malaya, and Egypt during the British colonial period in order to trace the making and transformation of the contemporary category of ‘Islamic law.’ She demonstrates that not only is Islamic law not the shari’ah, its present institutional forms, substantive content, symbolic vocabulary, and relationship to state and society—in short, its politics—are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter. Drawing on extensive archival work in English, Arabic, and Malay—from court records to colonial and local papers to private letters and visual material—Hussin offers a view of politics in the colonial period as an iterative series of negotiations between local and colonial powers in multiple locations. She shows how this resulted in a paradox, centralizing Islamic law at the same time that it limited its reach to family and ritual matters, and produced a transformation in the Muslim state, providing the frame within which Islam is articulated today, setting the agenda for ongoing legislation and policy, and defining the limits of change. Combining a genealogy of law with a political analysis of its institutional dynamics, this book offers an up-close look at the ways in which global transformations are realized at the local level.

A study of Islamic law and political power in the Ottoman Empires richest provincial cityWhat did Islamic law mean in the early modern period, a world of great Muslim empires? Often portrayed as the quintessential jurists law, to a large extent it was developed by scholars outside the purview of the state. However, for the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, justice was the ultimate duty of the monarch, and Islamic law was a tool of legitimation and governance. James E. Baldwin examines how the interplay of these two conceptions of Islamic law religious scholarship and royal justice undergirded legal practice in Cairo, the largest and richest city in the Ottoman provinces. Through detailed studies of the various formal and informal dispute resolution institutions and practices that formed the fabric of law in Ottoman Cairo, his book contributes to key questions concerning the relationship between the shariaa and political power, the plurality of Islamic legal practice, and the nature of centre-periphery relations in the Ottoman Empire.Key featuresOffers a new interpretation of the relationship between Islamic law and political powerPresents law as the key nexus connecting Egypt with the imperial capital Istanbul during the period of Ottoman decentralizationStudies judicial institutions such as the governors Diwan and the imperial council that have received little attention in previous scholarshipIntegrates the study of legal records with an analysis of how legal practice was represented in contemporary chroniclesProvides transcriptions and translations of a range of Ottoman legal documents

Introduction -- Ibn Nujaym : The Father of Late Ḥanafism? -- "The Sulṭan Says" : Ottoman Sultanic Authority in Late Ḥanafī Tradition -- Ottoman Rationale for Codification : The Mecelle -- Conclusion

The Second Formation of Islamic Law offers a new periodization of Islamic legal history in the eastern Islamic lands.

Stephens argues that encounters between Islam and British colonial rule in South Asia were fundamental to the evolution of modern secularism.