Empire’s embrace of secular governmentality called for a rhetoric of state separation from religion. At the same time, however, the state’s promise of religious autonomy and the ideological underpinnings and administrative exigencies of indirect rule translated into the co-option, regulation, and transformation of religion and religious institutions. In the end, therefore, imperial secular governmentality–in its varied spatial and temporal manifestations–entailed an uneasy truce between the rhetoric of state-religion separation, and the everyday intimacy of religion and state authority. The conclusion argues that that paradox is central to the law and politics of the modern state’s governance of religious difference.

Indirect rule was integral to the colonial governance of religion. The state’s intimacy with Muslim elites gave rise to accusations of ‘Muslim sub-imperialism” by Protestant missionaries and other critics who argued that rather than hinging on the separation of the state from all religions, colonial governance entailed the “unblushing bolstering up of Islam.” This chapter argues that indirect rule did not amount to an elevation or even preservation of the caliphal governance ideals. Instead, that mode of governance entailed the transformation of those institutions. Indirect rule was, therefore, not only governance through ‘Islamic institutions,’ but more importantly, it was the governance of those institutions. That governance process culminated in the making of a distinct British colonial Islamic law. That colonial law emerged from the alteration of the precolonial constitutional balance of powers between jurists’ expositions of the Shari’a (fiqh), on the one hand, and political authorities’ jurisdiction over a law (“siyasa”), on the other. This chapter traces that transformation as central to the career of imperial secular governmentality in the colony.

This chapter chronicles the late colonial state’s elimination of Islamic law from public law through a Penal Code rooted in imperial law. The transformation of Islamic law since the inception of colonial rule belied the early colonial state’s claim to retaining Islamic criminal law. Nevertheless, the formal retention of the Shari’a in public law through Islamic criminal law had been a distinct feature of Northern Nigeria, underlining the formal status of Muslim elites and Islamic law. In response to the concerted criticism of missionaries, and senior colonial officials, the 1958 reforms abrogated the ceremonial status of Islamic law. Even as the 1958 Penal Code removed all illusions of the retention of Islamic law, administrators and Muslim elites legitimated the reform exercise by invoking Islamic legal authority, particularly the practice of Muslim societies. That discourse capaciously expanded the state’s power to regulate the content of Islamic law by re-casting the state’s Sharia-constrained siyasa jurisdiction as an expansive siyasa whose constitutional boundaries are drawn by the modern state. By so doing, the 1958 reforms sealed the state’s prerogative to govern religion.

Set in Africa’s most populous Muslim country, the book takes on a paradox: colonial governance in Northern Nigeria entailed indirect rule through Muslim intermediaries and caliphate institutions; yet, the state insisted on its secularity. In unravelling this puzzle, the book offers a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, the book illustrates constitutional struggles triggered by the colonial state’s governance of religion and interrogates its legacy in the postcolonial state. The book illuminates the dynamic interplay between law, religion, and power in the political context of the modern state’s unique emergence from colonial processes.

After the 2011 Arab uprisings, Egypt adopted a new constitution in 2014 that strengthened the principle of equality between men and women. In spite of its call on the State to achieve equality in all areas, family law continues to establish significant differences between wives and husbands within the couple. This contribution examines the reforms introduced in Egyptian personal status law since the beginning of the twentieth century and the differences based on gender that remain in both marriage and divorce rights and stresses how governments had to present the reforms as taking place within the shari’a in order to avoid their rejection by conservative religious circles and society.

This chapter examines the legacy of the colonial governance of religion. Those struggles have inherited the nation's complex colonial history as an essentialist debate between a Muslim camp advancing a Sharia renaissance agenda and opposed to secularism and a Christian camp opposing the Sharia project and championing the secularist separation of the state from religion. That memory of the colonial experience is borne of both sides' criticism of colonial rule; however, neither the drivers of the Sharia renaissance agenda nor their Christian critics are liberated from the history of imperial rule. Both seek the governance of religion in the manner of the colonial state they despise. As with actors in the colonial state, the postcolonial camps also deploy the notions of secularist separation and religious liberty in fluid ways, belying their arguments about their unconditional fidelity to either idea. The chapter, therefore, argues that imperial secular governmentality, which has survived into the postcolonial state, is far from the untroubled mode of domination it is often criticized as being. It is instead a domain of contestation.

A detailed examination of Strauss’s interpretation of Alfarabi’s summary of Plato’s Laws is the subject of Chapter 4. Strauss’s complex article on Alfarabi’s summary, which complements his earlier “Fârâbî’s Plato,” has received minimal attention. The original manuscript of Strauss’s article, found among the Leo Strauss Papers, can substantially improve our understanding of this text and provide the opportunity for a more detailed commentary: The paragraphs of this manuscript are numbered, and contain headings which are absent in the published version of the article. My interpretation of this article will take these aspects of the original manuscript, as well as Strauss’s other writings and correspondence on Alfarabi and his course transcripts, into account.

Chapter 1 is dedicated to the interpretation of a recently discovered, unpublished typescript by Strauss on Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. In this transcript, available as Appendix A and composed sometime after 1956, Strauss underscores the conflict between philosophy and Islam in Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. The transcript consists only of short notes and therefore, to reveal its message, it needs to be interpreted in the context of Strauss’s other writings. Strauss’s interpretation of Averroes is based on the idea that Averroes must have been aware of the incompatibility of Islamic revelation with the best regime of Plato. Unlike other scholars, who are mainly preoccupied with Averroes’s access or lack thereof to a reliable translation of Plato’s Republic, Strauss argues that the deficiencies of Averroes’s commentary do not mean that Averroes did not have access to Plato’s Republic; he claims that such apparent deficiencies might be intentional and significant for understanding Averroes’s views.

Police practices substantiate legal abstractions, but frequently the police are influenced by normative frameworks beyond the framework of the civil laws that regulate their work.This chapter examines the interrelationship between Jordan’s tradition of legal pluralism and the hegemonic values that influence different kinds of social order. It also considers how the civil legal system takes account of tribal settlements with respect to the ‘personal right’ accorded to victims, and reviews how the blend of customary, formalised tribal, Islamic and civil legal traditions that co-exist in Jordan shape the field of practice within which the police manage grievances. Frequently exercising discretion, the police treat some of these grievances as crimes, and others as disputes between citizens, reflecting the common reticence of citizens to prosecute cases in the civil courts.

In the Islamic Ecumene shared religious principles intertwined with other foundational beliefs, which harkened back to the Turkic-Mongol tradition of the Islamic empires, providing cultural unity. The Islamic World constituted an international society despite the absence of a clear hegemonic power. Institutions, laws, and collective beliefs embodied in everyday practices, rituals, and even the design of buildings and cities provided unity in a heterogeneous and diverse Islamic ecumene.

The Islamic empires, and specifically the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, were not antithetical to the Westphalian principles of international order. The claim of Islamic and Ottoman incompatibility had more to do with European colonial ambitions. Altering their universalist claims, Ottoman rulers engaged in significant adjustments to Western principles of international diplomacy and international relations. Studying the Islamic world provides insights into how a regional order might be based on a shared collective identity rather than on material dominance by a hegemonic power. The Ottoman Empire provides a perfect case to examine adjustment at the peak of Western imperial expansion and confrontation with the West.