Colonial powers dismantled Islamic legal reproduction by expropriating waqfs and replacing legal pedagogy

Evidence

By the last quarter of the century, the French managed to break up the Algerian legal class and its system of law and legal education, in near-exact parallel with the Ottoman scene. Deprived of their resources due to the expropriation and centralization of waqfs and to various French administrative and educational reforms that changed the structure of the Shariʿa, the ulama were subjected to a qualitative diminishment in the very pedagogy and hermeneutical practice that defined their functions. As happened in other colonial contexts, the socioepistemic mechanisms that reproduced the legal profession largely ceased to exist, and in its place a European system of legal reproduction was installed, with new courts, new types of jurists, lawyers, and European codes of every type and shape. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 245

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors Milgrom’s account of institutional reproduction of legal systems — colonial destruction of the socioepistemic apparatus that reproduced Shariʿa jurists parallels the deliberate destruction of the law merchant’s institutions.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of colonial sovereignty over life and the destruction of indigenous institutional orders.