The introduction to the book situates British approaches to administering Islamic law in India within the wider contexts of the global emergence of secular regimes of legal governance. It shows how the British approach to governing Indian religious fostered a more antagonistic relationship between secular and religious spheres of social life than they cultivated at home. Within these larger frameworks, colonial law often forced Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular into the position of the religious “Other,” who stood in for the antithesis of secular rationality and universality. Muslims themselves, however, often resisted these oppositions, instilling colonial secularism with foundational instabilities. Setting the stage for the rest of the book, the introduction argues that these structural instabilities contributed to the enduring power of colonial secularism and opened it up to unexpected subversions.