Islamic legal vocabulary shaped mid-nineteenth-century arguments for reason and law.

Evidence

Circulating in a wider field of debate, liberalism also competed—and intersected—with other legal and political discourses that promoted overlapping ideological positions. The important role Islamic legal vocabulary assumed during debates about the Wahhabi trials cautions against a simplistic approach to classifying all defences of reason, law, or representative government in the mid-nineteenth century as derivative of a Western liberal project. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 174

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques that provincialize European liberalism and its ‘universal’ vocabulary.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Liberalism didn’t arrive in India by steamship’ — tracing non-Western idioms of rule of law and public opinion.