SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This paper analyses the potential for critical engagements akin to those of the TWAIL movement with the imperial past of Islamic law, focusing on the specific legal and social developments that influenced Islamic legal theory and practice in the Muslim ‘gunpowder empires’ – Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal. The paper also looks into later ‘post-’ and ‘inter-imperial’ reformulations of what in this brief study is conceived as praxis of Islamic law, towards a new understanding of the various agents of Islamic law, including the judge (qāḍī), the jurisconsult (muftī), the author-jurist and the professor at law as well as hitherto under-researched subjectivity of the gender-variant scholar (known, inter alia, as khadim or agha). The central argument of this paper is that, in order for praxis of Islamic law to re-emerge as a distinct post-colonial, post-imperial and epistemologically Third World phenomenon, a special attention has to be paid to class and social distinctions within the agential strata of Islamic law, with the positionality of the gender-variant scholar (khadim, agha) as a particularly skilful negotiator of legal, social and economic boundaries produced by theory and practice of Islamic law in their imperial and post-imperial life-forms.