Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- 1. Partisanship, territorialism and transregional networks of belonging -- 2. AAuthority, ijtihad and temporality -- 3. Colonialism, translation and seduction -- 4. Science, perception and objectivity -- 5. Religion, the secular and language -- Conclusion -- Bibliography.

"This book is a study of the Muslim world's entanglement with colonial modernity. More specifically, it is an historical examination of the development of the long-standing, indigenous tradition of learning and praxis known as Islamic law (shariʻa, fiqh) as a result of its imbalanced interaction with new European modes of knowing during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the colonial experience. Drawing upon the writings of jurist-scholars from the Ḥanaf īschool of law writing in Cairo, Kazan, Lucknow, Baghdad and Istanbul, Transformations of Tradition reveals several central shifts in Islamic legal writing that throw into doubt the possibility of reading its later trajectory through the lens of a continuous "tradition." By focusing especially on the work of Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʻī, Mufti of Egypt for a time and a leading scholar at the Azhar, Transformations shows that the colonial moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a significant rupture in how Muslim jurists understood history and authority, science and technology, and religion and the secular, thereby upending the very ground upon which Islamic law had until then functioned"-- Provided by publisher.