Islamic Law and Coloniality

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course seeks to understand the ways in which Islamic law was transformed through a variety of colonial legal encounters and to what extent the colonial project of jural colonization continues to effect the conceptualization of Islamic law in modern nation states today. The first part of the course will focus on the theoretical and political foundations of both colonialism and jural colonization. It will consider various legal systems, the rise of the ‘rule of law’ paradigm, and the transformation of legal concepts across empires. The second part of the course will shift to analyzing jural colonization of India by the British, and jural colonization of Egypt by the French and the British. We will closely examine how these colonial powers understood and deployed Islamic law, as well as analyze the institutions they constructed to support their project. The final part of the course will turn to Islamic law in a post-colonial world. It will begin by considering projects of decolonization and questioning the role of law within them. It will then turn to analyze the function of Islamic law in post-colonial Egypt, India and Pakistan. Questions of religious plurality, secularism, and Islamic constitutionalism will be discussed. The course builds towards a substantive final project in which students are expected to research a country of their choosing and provide a similar legal analysis from the colonial to post-colonial context.