SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Studies of Empire, as a mode of governance, a trans-historical reality and an enduring legacy of European colonialism, continue to generate an influential body of academic literature. Yet, accounts of multiple Muslim and non-Muslim imperial reformulations of Islamic legality and their lasting legacies in local, regional and international legal domains are still relatively few. The goal of this special issue is to generate a range of stimulating discussions on law and Empire in the Muslim world, with a particular focus on theoretical meeting points between the studies in history, politics, sociology and anthropology of law. The contributions we offer here are heterodox in both methodology and thematic focus, and seek to address law and Empire as broad analytical categories—inhering in or traversing historical as well as contemporary Islamicate polities. In particular, a number of articles pay close attention to the historical processes that caused the transformation of the sharīʿa into state law and the implications for inserting the sharīʿa within a constitutional structure. They also closely investigate various historical and contemporary Muslim narratives that engage with international and transnational law, relations and politics. In so doing, many articles take into consideration the role of Islamic law in spheres and geographical regions that ostensibly lie on the ‘periphery’ of ‘world-making’ through global(ised) law and politics. But even when cast as ‘peripheral’, Muslim legal and social lifeworlds ordinarily harbour knowledge that complicates and transgresses imperial and post-imperial boundaries, including those imposed by the very concept of the nation-state.