Islamic legal categories like dar-ul-aman furnished anti-colonial arguments against emergency rule

Evidence

Classifying India as a dar-ul-aman challenged the government’s assertion of colonial difference as a justification for suspending the normal rule of law, presenting arguments that overlapped with liberal defences of the rule of law but which emerged out of a separate and well-developed tradition of Islamic legal debate. Indian Muslims’ writing on the subject presented Islam as a rational religion, emphasizing its ability to adapt to different conditions. They opposed the idea that Muslims were fanatics whose religion was fundamentally at odds with Western civilization. By insisting that colonial India was a ‘land of security’, Indian Muslims suggested that treating India as perpetually in a state of emergency was unjustified. The Indian and Anglo-Indian publics became increasingly familiar with this seemingly esoteric Islamic legal vocabulary from reading reports about the debates in the English-language press, culminating in W.W. Hunter’s famous commentary, The Indian Musalmans: Are they Bound in Conscience toRebelAgainsttheQueen? In the courtroom Anstey and Ingram were able to harness Islamic legal vocabulary to their own framing of the case 79 I have been unable to locate any Urdu newspapers from Calcutta or Patna from the period but translations of several articles published in local Urdu papers can be found among government papers on the trial. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 162

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to legal-history and colonial-studies material on emergency powers and the suspension of the rule of law; also to the reader’s interest in cross-cultural moral and political argument from religious traditions.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘The Land of Security’ — how a technical Islamic jurisprudence of territory (dar-ul-harb vs dar-ul-aman) became a vocabulary for contesting colonial emergency government.
• DEEPTHINKING: Reframes the liberal rule-of-law critique as one of two parallel traditions converging on the same conclusion, quietly destabilizing the assumption that secular liberalism owns the critique of emergency power.