The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State. By Iza Hussin

Abstract

Iza Hussin’s book is a fresh account of the interaction between Islamic law and both colonialism and the modern state. Its freshness does not lie in advancing a comprehensive or causal explanation. It builds solidly on some past writings, but it recenters our understandings, shows links among developments across the Muslim world, and ventures into much underexplored terrain. The result will likely be embraced by a multidisciplinary audience and provide a model of how to understand Islamic law in the modern world. Hussin questions “the assumption that modernity happened to the Muslim state, and that it rang the death knell for the shari `a system” (p. 214). Her foil is clearly (though sometimes obliquely) Wael B. Hallaq who has argued, most forcefully in The Impossible State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), that the Islamic shari `a and the modern state possess incompatible essences. She claims that modernity generally and colonialism specifically did not supplant but deeply affected the development of Islamic law. But they did not do so in any uniform way, nor does her account write Muslims out of their own history. Instead, she distributes agency widely, among colonial officials, wealthy elites, legal professionals, and Muslim religious and legal scholars.