Islamic Law on Trial provides a close reading of the work of Indian Muslim lawyers, judges, and legal scholars in British colonial South Asia, illustrating the interpretive, translative, and creative ways in which they reconfigured the practice and theory of Islamic law. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for post-colonial understandings and practices of Islamic law into the present. Through this study, Siddiqui brings a rich breadth of empirical material from South Asia into ongoing critical discussions of the impact of colonialism on Islamic law, the importance of Muslim interlocutors in the remaking of Islam and law during periods of Western colonial rule, and the enduring legacies of this struggle in contemporary Muslim politics and life.

Islamic Law on Trial begins with a chronological tracing of colonial transformations of law, from the East India Company’s initial negotiations with the Mughal Empire and its expansion through jurisdiction, legislation, judiciary, and the generation of canon, often referred to as Anglo-Muhammadan law. It elaborates the manner in which, after formal colonial control was established, the “colonial legal terrain” was organized through the centralization of the judiciary, the standardization of legal codes, and judicial precedent. It was on this colonial legal terrain that Muslim legal actors—‘ulama (Muslim scholars), lawyers, and judges—contested and negotiated questions of sovereignty, internal disagreement, and the uses and meanings of Islamic law under colonial rule. The book ends in the present to show that the end of British colonialism did not mark a rupture from this terrain, but its entrenchment.

The account of Islamic law under colonialism that Siddiqui frames is one that recent scholarship on Islam, empire, and law has begun to elaborate, in comparative detail.Footnote ¹ This scholarship has pivoted from an understanding of colonization as takeover or juridical death (Hallaq 2012), to rethinking the ways in which colonialism reconfigured the arena in which Islamic legal content, institutions, theory and practice existed, and in doing so reordered the ways in which Muslims encountered, navigated, defined, and redefined Islamic law, with critical consequences for the post-colonial Muslim state.Footnote ² Siddiqui joins a recent effervescence of scholarship which brings to this conversation the varied texts, practices, and strategies of Muslim actors, who are shown to have played critical roles in the renegotiation of Islamic law—within, through, and beyond, the colonial.Footnote ³

“These legal actors found ways to incorporate into the legal terrain modes of Islamic reasoning and legal discourse that had hitherto existed primarily outside the colonial apparatus.” (25) Siddiqui makes evident that these actors varied in their institutional locations, their approaches to colonial power, and their degree of engagement with practices of formal adjudication, delineating, for example, Deobandi, Barelvi, Ahl-i Hadith, and Farangi Mahalli debates and practical responses to the newly urgent problem of legal sovereignty under British rule. The book moves from the ‘ulama towards Muslim lawyering and judging as an arena in which to consider the specific perils and opportunities of entanglement with the institutions and logics of the colonial state, providing close empirical engagement of cases, texts, and actors at different levels of the legal system. In their diversity, these materials provide a rich resource for reconsidering, in the classroom as well as in research, archival sources for the study of Islamic law in colonial South Asia.

Siddiqui concludes her chronology in post-colonial India, with another prominent legacy of colonization: codification, focusing on efforts by the Muslim minority in India to seek legal codification. As with other studies on the effects of colonialism on the post-colonial state, the book observes that the demand among Muslims for formal law and the delivery of Islam in law by the state was one outcome of the colonial legal terrain: “a new mode of legal rationality, one aimed at a monopoly over legal sovereignty that had previously been diffused across various individuals and institutions.” (183) In this, she suggests that the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board (1972) mirrors colonial logics of law and codification, and its efforts to legislate a unified Islamic family law code “can be seen as the final text of the Anglo-Muhammadan legal canon.” (186).

In this final discussion, and in her approach to translation and its uses in the generation of law across a contested terrain, Siddiqui illustrates another set of methods for scholarship in Islamic legal studies, especially but perhaps not limited to the colonial period. Translation emerges as itself a key archive for thinking about how legitimacy is made and maintained, and for discerning the multiple audiences to which texts in translation are aimed, thereby opening up fields for exploring the political, theological, and sovereign stakes involved in the work of translationFootnote ⁴ (189–193). These dynamics encapsulate the fundamental lesson at the heart of Siddiqui’s project, which is to show “the emergence of new modes of Islamic legal reasoning and the coexistence of both rupture and continuity even as colonial power fundamentally shaped the theory and practice of the law.” (193).