SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The thematic focus of this project can be described as an attempt to critically reconsider various historical and present-day forms of social and legal normativity, within and without the Islamic legal tradition, that have influenced Muslim polities and economies, as well as Muslims’ individual and collective sense of the self. Normative orders – both inside and outside sharī‘a and other relevant forms of law – have played a key role in shaping and challenging Muslim theological, legal, social, political and economic thought. They are, however, rarely examined in their trans-historical, agentive context, as the providers or justifiers of legal rules, public or personal morality, economic and political developments. This project seeks to respond to this lacuna in contemporary scholarship by illuminating the power struggles, hierarchies, specific legal qualities and spatial contingencies of the normative orders that have influenced Muslim thought and ethos. The project also attempts to interrogate the relationships between both formal (i.e. stipulated by law or other dominant public infrastructures) and informal normativities, and their social imperatives, in order to better understand how normative landscapes have been negotiated and created in Muslim contexts. But, while the idiosyncrasies of Muslim normative experience are highlighted where appropriate, they are not analysed in isolation from certain ‘external’ normativities that had impacted Muslim lifeworlds to a considerable degree – such as those pertaining to European imperialism and modernity. On the contrary, the overall aim of this project is to expose a wide spectrum of the normative orders that had left a significant imprint on Muslim lifeworlds, past and present, and in doing so to provide a blueprint for further inquires into norm-making processes in Islamic law, and beyond.