Call for Papers: Islamic Codification beyond the Modern State

Call for papers, deadline Jan 15, 2024.

Workshop: New place and date: Oxford, Sept. 4-5.

Islamic codification beyond the modern state

The term “codification” signifies for many scholars the appropriation of sharia by colonial and later, national states, leading to a separation between sharia and law and thereby to its fundamental transformation (Hallaq 2009, Layish 2004). Codification, in this narrative, is an inherently modern and western enterprise, tied to the emergence of modern states and inspired by the Code Napoléon, causing the latter to spread, in localised forms, throughout the Middle East (Rubin 2016). In this reading, any attempt to use the term for earlier periods or those areas that remained marginal to nineteenth-century reforms appears as a clear anachronism. 

More recent studies seek to nuance the cooperation between some ulama and the state in the centuries leading up to the nineteenth century (Ayoub 2020, Burak 2015, 2019). Both Fadel (1996) and Fekry Ibrahim (2015) use terms such as “code-like”, “proto-codes” and “codification episteme” to describe the processes of standardisation visible in the texts used in the intertwined fields of education and legal scholarship and practice from the thirteenth century onwards, a prominent example being the mukhtasar genre. In doing so, they push back in time efforts of systematisation and standardisation of sharia, and reappraise the role of pre-colonial state authorities. The overall arc of the narrative, however, from original plurality and flexibility in the “classical” period to greater centralisation and finally to nineteenth-century full-fledged codes, remains the same. This narrative remains for now highly Ottoman-centric. 

It is now time to take stock of the great advances in scholarship produced by this paradigm, to nuance it further, both geographically and chronologically, and to reclaim the idea of codification by extracting it from its nineteenth-century straightjacket (Emon 2016, Canale 2009). The possibility of codification is inherent in law itself, and the question of when and how people attempt to establish codes, why, and with regards to what matters, is one for empirical research rather than categorical or ideological statements (Dresch 2012, Dresch and Scheele 2015). This is even more so as sharia did not develop in a void, but existed through its history in rich, political and institutional contexts, whose interplay with sharia cannot be reduced to an opposition between ‘custom’ and ‘Islamic law’, or ‘customary institutions’ and ‘the state’ (Shabana 2010). 

We therefore invite contributors to think through the specific cases they are familiar with, in order to develop a fresh analytical vocabulary that would help us understand local or regional attempts at codification, as far as possible through the eyes of those who attempt to implement them. We are setting the bar for the definition of codification deliberately low - ‘codification’ in our sense can refer to any attempt to establish a set of definite and abstract rules by and for a given set of people (not necessarily a state), intended to outlast particular events, inspired by, or within the semiotic context or language of, sharia. We are thereby hoping to go beyond unhelpful dichotomies (of modern/premodern or state/non-state), and to develop a new analytical vocabulary to understand borderline cases and engage in transregional comparison. The cases can be from codification attempts and processes on various scales from the precolonial or later periods by actors beyond the modern state. By this, we mean actors who are not part of the formal state apparatus, but attempt to create their own separate legal sphere in its margins or interstices.   

• Examples could include codes issued by pre-nineteenth century state formations, such as lists of rules made by Zaydi and Moroccan imams or their local delegates
• Codes produced by and with reference to local assemblies, or other ‘non-state’ political or religious institutions
• Codes promoted by socio-economic organisations, trade guilds, or rebel communities
• Regulations made by Islamic organisations in cooperation with contemporary states in Muslim minority settings 
• Written or unwritten codes followed by a defined group of people as part of their juridical understanding of morality and normativity. 

We encourage papers especially (but not exclusively) from a non-Ottoman setting and by women and emerging scholars. Interested participants should send a detailed abstract of at least 500 words along with a brief bio to mahmoodpana@gmail.com before 15 January, 2024. We will try to cover most of the travel and accommodation expenses of the selected participants for the workshop.

Place and date: The workshop will be held in Oxford, September 4-5. (Originally planned in Edinburgh, Sept. 10-11, 2024.)

Aim: Theme issue in a relevant international peer-reviewed journal.

Editors: Eirik Hovden, Mahmood Kooria, Judith Scheele.

References cited:

Ayoub, Samy. 2020. Law, empire, and the sultan: Ottoman imperial authority and late Hanafi jurisprudence. Oxford: University Press.

Burak, Guy. 2015. The second formation of Islamic law. Cambridge: University Press.

—. 2019. Codification, legal borrowing and the localization of ‘Islamic law’. In Routledge Handbook of Islamic Law(eds) Khaled Abou El Fadl, Ahmad Atif Ahmad and Hossein Modaressi. London: Taylor & Francis / Routledge, 389-99.

Canale, Damiano. 2009. The many faces of the codification of law in modern continental Europe. In D. Canale, P. Grossi, H. Hofmann (ed.), A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Civil Law World, 1600-1900. Dordrecht: Springer, 135-83.

Dresch, Paul. 2012. Aspects of Non-State Law: Early Yemen and Perpetual Peace. In P. Dresch and H. Skoda (eds.) Legalism: Anthropology and History. Oxford: University Press, 145–72.

Dresch, Paul and Judith Scheele. 2015. Rules and Categories: an overview. In Legalism: rules and categories (eds.) P. Dresch and J. Scheele. Oxford: University Press, 1-27.

Emon, Anver. 2016. Codification and Islamic law: the ideology behind a tragic narrative. Middle East Law and Governance 8, 275-309.

Fadel 1996, he social logic of taqlīd and the rise of the mukhtaṣar. Islamic Law and Society

Fekry Ibrahim, Ahmed. 2015. The codification episteme in Islamic juristic discourse between inertia and change. Islamic Law and Society 22, 157-220.

Hallaq, Wael. 2009. An introduction to Islamic law. Cambridge: University Press.

Layish, Aharon. 2004. The transformation of the sharî‘a from jurists’ law to statutory law in the contemporary Muslim world. Die Welt des Islams 44/1, 85-113.

Shabana, Ayman. 2010. Custom in Islamic law and legal theory. New York: Springer.