Everyday Islamic Law And The Making Of Modern South Asia

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But qazis and muftis, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere, they resisted the colonial state's authority over personal law and rejected legal codification by embracing flexibility and possibility. With postcards, letters, and telegrams, they made everyday Islamic law vibrant and resilient and challenged the hegemony of the Anglo-Indian legal system. Following these developments from the beginning of the Raj through independence, Elizabeth Lhost rejects narratives of stagnation and decline to show how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life, even beyond colonial courtrooms and the confines of family law. Lhost shows how ordinary Muslims shaped colonial legal life and how their diversity and difference have contributed to contemporary debates about religion, law, pluralism, and democracy in South Asia and beyond.

Stephens argues that encounters between Islam and British colonial rule in South Asia were fundamental to the evolution of modern secularism.

This volume of Princeton Readings in Religions brings together the work of more than thirty scholars of Islam and Muslim societies in South Asia to create a rich anthology of primary texts that contributes to a new appreciation of the lived religious and cultural experiences of the world's largest population of Muslims. The thirty-four selections--translated from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, Hindavi, Dakhani, and other languages--highlight a wide variety of genres, many rarely found in standard accounts of Islamic practice, from oral narratives to elite guidance manuals, from devotional songs to secular judicial decisions arbitrating Islamic law, and from political posters to a discussion among college women affiliated with an "Islamist" organization. Drawn from premodern texts, modern pamphlets, government and organizational archives, new media, and contemporary fieldwork, the selections reflect the rich diversity of Islamic belief and practice in South Asia. Each reading is introduced with a brief contextual note from its scholar-translator, and Barbara Metcalf introduces the whole volume with a substantial historical overview.

An anthology of work from 32 scholars, this volume offers new approaches to understanding the lived experiences of the largest Muslim population in the world.

The articles in this volume build up ethnographic analysis complementary to the historiography of South Asian Islam, which has explored the emergence of reformism in the context of specific political and religious circumstances of nineteenth-century British India. Taking up diverse popular and scholarly debates as well as everyday religious practices, this volume also breaks away from the dominant trend of mainstream ethnographic work, which celebrates Sufi-inspired forms of Islam as tolerant, plural, authentic and so on, pitted against a 'reformist' Islam. Urging a more nuanced examination of all forms of reformism and their reception in practice, the contributions here powerfully demonstrate the historical and geographical specificities of reform projects. In doing so, they challenge prevailing perspectives in which substantially different traditions of reform are lumped together into one reified category (often carelessly shorthanded as 'wah'habism') and branded as extremist – if not altogether demonised as terrorist.

During the last 100 years there has been extensive English-language writing & research on Islam in South Asia, both by Muslim scholars & by non-Muslims. This volume brings together the most significant & enduring work, most of it published in the past 30 years, but with occasional use of older material.

This book explores the evolution of a Shia Ismaili identity and crucial aspects of the historical forces that conditioned the development of the Muslim modern in late colonial South Asia. It traces the legal process that, since the 1860s, recast a Shia Imami identity for the Ismailis, and explicates the public career of Imam Aga Khan III amid heightened religious internationalism since the late-nineteenth century, the age of 'religious internationals'. It sheds light and elaborates on the enduring legacies of questions such as the Aga's understanding of colonial modernity, his ideas of India, restructured modalities of community governance and the evolution of Imamate-sponsored institutions, key strands in scholarship that characterized the development of the Muslim and Shia Ismaili modern, and Muslim universality vis-à-vis denominational particularities that often transcended the remits of the modular nation and state structure.