Two ›Cultural Translators‹ of Islamic Law and German East Africa

Abstract

In the existing Islamic legal historiography on the 19th century, the focus has mostly been on the state-sponsored codification projects and the legal reformist attempts of Muslim modernists. In this article, I take a different approach by exploring the trajectory of one Islamic law-book (Ghāyat al-ikhtiṣār) written in the 12th century and its journey to the 19th century via multiple commentaries and super-commentaries across the terrains of the Shāfiʿīte school of Islamic law. I examine two »cultural translators« of this law book, who hailed from completely distant socio-cultural, political, and geographical contexts: Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (1784–1860), the rector of al-Azhar University Cairo from 1847 till his death, and Eduard Sachau (1845–1930), a professor at the University of Berlin starting in 1876. Juxtaposing al-Bājūrī with Sachau, as two cultural translators of one law, I investigate the nuances of mediators who stand between different legal times, traditions, languages, and meanings associate or disassociate with the realities of their particular socio-cultural contexts. Their experiments involving what is familiar and what is foreign explicate that the ambivalences in legal transfers cannot be reduced into any particular moments or intentions of the mediators, and the larger context is emphatically embedded within legalistic projects. Accordingly, the very concept of cultural translation should be reexamined in terms of law in order to accommodate various complexities.