Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839–1937By Scott S. Reese

Abstract

Scott Reese’s new book presents a complex and compelling story of the creation of a local community in a rapidly expanding hub of global inter-connections, and the lived experience of Muslims there ‘shaped by the pervasive colonial state’ (p. 1). He opens this history with a sketch of Aden as a town built upon symbolically rich foundations of an ‘enchanted’ medieval topography, which subsequently was transformed to become an urban centre of modern infrastructure and upward mobility under the British occupation as it grew dramatically from the mid-nineteenth century. The large influx of migrants that swelled the port during that period brought elements of their own traditions with them, while also embracing the local heritage of their new home—rebuilding and sponsoring activities at older saints’ tombs of the city in ways that contributed to the creation of a distinctly ‘Adeni’ community. The Muslims of nineteenth-century Aden were ‘quintessential subjects of the Empire’ (p. 2), but also ‘bound btogether more tightly by the sinews of their faith’ (p. 163). In his treatment of their historical experience, Reese traverses some familiar territory of law and administration, through which his work further contributes to important lines of discussion in recent scholarship on the imperial shaping of Shariʿa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes critical examination of the implications of struggles for administrative control over awqāf, the British importation of the panchayyat system from the Deccan and its local adaptations for administering arbitration, as well as a nuanced discussion of some of the mechanisms for reconciliation in qāḍī jurisdiction within the broader administration of justice in the colony.