Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial law and Arabs in Southeast Asia by Nurfadzilah Yahaya (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial law and Arabs in Southeast Asia by Nurfadzilah Yahaya Sai Siew-Min Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial law and Arabs in Southeast Asia. By Nurfadzilah Yahaya. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2020. 251 pp, ISBN 978-150-1750-87-8 (cloth) Nurfadzilah Yahaya's Fluid Jurisdictions: colonial law and Arabs in Southeast Asia is an expansive book that speaks to multiple fields of history. This is surely a book about the Hadhrami Arab diasporic elite in island Southeast Asia but Nurfadzilah challenges what we know about diasporas and their relationships with colonialism and imperialism in this region from multiple angles. To begin with, the book is not a straightforward historical ethnography of 'the Arab diaspora' at a specific site, a genre readers may be more familiar with. Both in the Introduction and Conclusion, Nurfadzilah takes issue with our easy association of 'diaspora' and 'diasporic consciousness' with 'mobility', 'hybridity' and 'cosmopolitanism'. Addressing the scholarship of Sumit Mandal and Eng-Seng Ho who emphasize the 'hybridity' of [End Page 217] the Arab diaspora, she writes that there were many Arabs who identified solely as 'Arab' by patrilineal descent and that the category was remarkably durable across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. Her objective, however, is not to revert to a purist definition of 'Arab-ness' as the counter-point to 'hybridised Arab-ness' or attempt to fix the category to discern who belonged. Instead, the book resists reducing what being 'diasporic' meant historically to our cliched imagination. Relying on lively prose and the power of historical narrative to weave a complex and multi-dimensional story that is simultaneously conceptually sophisticated, Nurfadzilah has written a book that requires concentrated and repeated reading to appreciate her intricate insights and careful treatment of both the copious archival materials she examines as well as the formidable range of scholarly literature with which she is engaged. What makes this book unlike most historical-ethnographical studies on ethnic diasporas in Southeast Asia is its fine-grained examination of colonial law in what used to be the Straits Settlements and the Netherlands East Indies. Trained as a legal historian, Nurfadzilah draws heavily from an impressive and updated scholarship in the fields of imperial, colonial and international law, and legal pluralism in particular. While legal pluralism and what is known as 'Islamic law' in Southeast Asia is well-studied, studies on ethnic diasporas in Southeast Asia have seldom intersected with these fields. The scholarship on ethnic diasporas in the region tend to be stripped down to focus overwhelmingly on the identity of diasporic communities understood in the political, socio-economic and culturalist senses. Very rarely does law, and for that matter, colonial law, feature centrally in these studies. Colonial law and colonialist legal classifications tend to appear in the literature only to be dismissed by scholars for suppressing the fluidity and hybridity of diasporic identities or used to demonstrate how diasporic communities 'played' multiple legal identities that were arguably insincere and false. This book, however, challenges these perspectives by featuring colonial law at its core and as Nurfadzilah argues, flips conventional wisdom around. The book demonstrates how, why and with what paradoxical and unexpected consequences diasporic Arab elites appealed to and allied themselves with colonial legal regimes, in the process driving the expansion of colonial jurisdiction over the most intimate areas of their lives as well as the lives of Muslim populations in the region. Nurfadzilah's demonstration that colonial law was instrumental to how mobile individuals in the region—including women whose presence is well-documented in the book—conducted their lives and businesses is one of the most significant contributions of the book to the study of diasporas in the region. The book opens with an evocative description of the so-called 'Oertatan' in the Malay world in 1599 which turns out to be a mangled name for the Malay word 'orang datang', meaning 'newly-arrived'. The Introduction is effective for mapping the geo-legal domains the book will traverse as well as the key concepts of writing and paperwork, diasporas, legal pluralism and Islamic law which centres the book. It is absolutely necessary to begin with the Introduction without which readers may...