Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2011
The Al-Fatāwā al-Hindiyya Al-ʿĀlamjīriyya is a compendium of Islamic Ḥanafi law. It was written in South Asia during the second half of the seventeenth century with the goal of filling the gap between local social reality and Islamic legal theory. In order to establish an authoritative ruling, the authors compared the views of Central Asian scholars on Ḥanafi law, like those from Balakh and Bukhārā, with the opinions held by the Iraqi scholars, in particular Abū Ḥanīfa and his two disciples. This paper argues that the South Asian scholars shared more similarities with their Iraqi colleagues than with the Central Asian branch of the Ḥanafi school of law, although the latter were closer to them chronologically than the Iraqi scholars. Furthermore, the South Asian scholars' “permissive” point of view regarding non-Muslim residents may be ascribed to the pressure of the social reality in South Asia, which pushed them to search for a compromise between the population's ruling Muslim minority and the non-Muslim majority.