Shari A Inshallah

Shari'a, Inshallah shows how people have used shari'a to struggle for peace, justice, and human rights in Somalia and Somaliland.

Western analysts have long denigrated Islamic states as antagonistic, even antithetical, to the rule of law. Mark Fathi Massoud tells a different story: for nearly 150 years, the Somali people have embraced shari'a, commonly translated as Islamic law, in the struggle for national identity and human rights. Lawyers, community leaders, and activists throughout the Horn of Africa have invoked God to oppose colonialism, resist dictators, expel warlords, and to fight for gender equality - all critical steps on the path to the rule of law. Shari'a, Inshallah traces the most dramatic moments of legal change, political collapse, and reconstruction in Somalia and Somaliland. Massoud upends the conventional account of secular legal progress and demonstrates instead how faith in a higher power guides people toward the rule of law.

In this book, a judge at the Shari'a Court of Jerusalem explains the religious law of Muslim minorities.

Scraps of Hope in Banda Aceh examines the rebuilding of the city of Banda Aceh in Indonesia in the aftermath of the celebrated Helsinki-based peace mediation process, thirty years of armed conflict, and the tsunami. Offering a critical contribution to the study of post-conflict politics, the book includes 14 documentary videos reflecting individuals’ experiences on rebuilding the city and following the everyday lives of people in Banda Aceh. Marjaana Jauhola mirrors the peace-making process from the perspective of the ‘outcast’ and invisible, challenging the selective narrative and ideals of the peace as a success story. Jauhola provides alternative ways to reflect the peace dialogue using ethnographic and film documentarist storytelling. Scraps of Hope in Banda Aceh tells a story of layered exiles and displacement, revealing hidden narratives of violence and grief while exposing struggles over gendered expectations of being good and respectable women and men. It brings to light the multiple ways of arranging lives and forming caring relationships outside the normative notions of nuclear family and home, and offers insights into the relations of power and violence that are embedded in the peace.

This book uncovers how colonial administrators, postcolonial governments and international aid agencies have promoted stability and their own visions of the rule of law in Sudan.

State-Building as Lawfare explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives? The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below.

This book provides the first account of the sustained entanglement of law, religion, and empire in Northern Nigeria.

Examines gift exchanges as a foundational notion both in anthropology and in debates about international economic governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.