Browsing by Subject "Islamic law"

This dissertation is a legal history of debt and economic life in the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. It draws on materials from Bahrain, Muscat, Bombay, Zanzibar and London to examine how members of an ocean-wide commercial society constructed relationships of economic mutualism with one another by mobilizing debt and credit. It further explores how they expressed their debt relationships through legal idioms, and how they mobilized commercial and legal instruments to adapt to the emergence of modern capitalism in the region.

At the same time, it looks at the concomitant development of an Indian Ocean-wide empire of law centered at Bombay, and explores how this Indian Ocean contractual culture encountered an Anglo-Indian legal regime that conceived of legal documents in a radically different way. By mobilizing written deeds in imaginative ways, and by strategically accessing British courts, Indian Ocean merchants were able to shape the contours of this growing legal regime.

Most broadly, the dissertation argues that law and courts became increasingly central to economic life in the Indian Ocean, and that economic actors in the region employed a wide range of different legal strategies in adapting to a changing world of commerce. In the Indian Ocean, as elsewhere, the histories of commerce and law were inextricably intertwined.

This dissertation examines the construction of gendered legal subjects in the influential legal works of the eleventh century Ḥanafī jurist, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Sarakhsī (d. 483 A.H./1090 C.E.). In particular, I explore how gendered subjects are imagined in legal matters pertaining to sexual desire. Through a close reading of several legal cases, I argue that gendered subjects in his legal work al-Mabsūṭ are constructed through an ontological framework that conceptualizes men as active and desiring and women as passive and desirable. This binary construal of gendered nature serves as a hermeneutical given in al-Sarakhsī’s legal argumentation and is produced through a phallocentric epistemology. Al-Sarakhsī’s discussions of desire and sexuality are mediated through the experience of the male body. While the dissertation endeavors to show the centrality of the active/passive binary in al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning, it also highlights the dissonances and fissures in the text’s construction of gendered subjects of desire. By tracing the intricacies of al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning, I note moments in which the text makes contradictory claims about gender and desire, as well as moments in which al-Sarakhsī must contend with realities that seemingly run up against his ontological framework. These moments in the text draw our attention to al-Sarakhsī’s active attempt at maintaining the coherence of the gendered ontology. I thus argue that the gendered ontology in al-Sarakhsī’s text is a legal fiction that both reflects his assumptions about gendered nature but is also constructed to rationalize legal precedence.

This dissertation asks how Moroccan scholars understood Islam's relationship to national territory in the twentieth century. It demonstrates how a genealogy of scholars adapted expansive theories of premodern Muslim imperial realms to the circumscribed Moroccan national territory that emerged in the early twentieth century. In the colonial period, Islamic law became a tool through which Muslim scholars argued for independent Moroccan sovereignty. It traces these discourses as they evolved into Morocco's postcolonial effort to incorporate neighboring territories, including Mauritania and the Western Sahara. It argues that this modern irredentism was part of a wider effort to frame the Moroccan nation-state by repurposing the Islamic political norms through which premodern Muslim empires governed in the region. This dissertation concludes by examining the decade after Morocco's 1975 occupation of the Western Sahara. This period saw the unfolding of a series of debates about the Moroccan king's gender and divinity. It shows that the king's body had become a metonymy for territory; and these debates were attempts to reconfigure the relationship between religion, land, and power in Morocco.