Colonial-modern states transmuted shari’a into codified private status law.

Evidence

“The shari¯‘a was not abandoned,” writes Nathan Brown, “but it was restricted to matters of personal status and to areas where it could be clearly and easily codified.” But when the shari¯‘a is structured essentially as a set of legal rules defining personal status, it is radically transformed. This is not because the shari¯‘a, by being confined to the private domain, is thereby deprived of political authority, something that advocates of an Islamic state argue should be restored. On the contrary, what happens to the shari¯‘a is best described not as curtailment but as transmutation. It is rendered into a subdivision of legal norms (fiqh) that are authorized and maintained by the centralizing state. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1090

Categorization

• DEFINE: Asad’s distinction between curtailment and transmutation — the state does not simply shrink religion’s reach but re-forms it as codified sub-law — is a precise causal mechanism for how secular modernity reorganizes religion.
• XREF: Parallel to Cooper: how state legal restructuring reframes what counts as ‘religious’ vs ‘secular’ domain — the transmutation concept could extend the vault argument about Christianity’s quiet privilege.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: the ‘private domain’ of religion is not protective withdrawal but a state-engineered re-formation — challenging both Islamist and liberal framings of shari’a’s confinement.