| Islamic law has changed radically in the last 150 years this project focusses on the dramatic transformation of Islamic law during the British colonial period in three cases: India, Malaya and Egypt, and its effects in the post-colonial state. It argues that colonial and local elites negotiated the scope, content and meaning of Islamic law in each case, creating new definitions of Islamic law, family, private/public space, ethnic, religious and gender identities. Original research shows that Islamic law is a product of political activity, and that legal norms traveled among colonial sites, limiting Islamic law to a narrow scope of private, 'religious' law, and defining contemporary possibilities for change. This project presents a new argument: that Islamic law in the contemporary state is a modern construction with important ramifications for ethnic and religious identity, state institutions and elite power in the Muslim world today. This study challenges the prevailing popular view of Islamic law---and Muslim adherence to Islamic law---as a monolith, offering instead a view of Islamic law as locally specific, intensely political, and richly varied. |
