Translation of Islamic law detached it from its communal and social foundations

Evidence

Furthermore, the suppression of customary law, having tremendous effects on its own, also meant the obliteration of the communal ways in which the Shariʿa operated. In other words, the very act of translation uprooted Islamic law from its interpretive-linguistic soil and, at one and the same time, from the native social matrix in which it was embedded and on which its successful operation depended. This is not all. The new legal configuration allowed the British to oust Shariʿa’s jurists and replace them with lawyers trained in the British ways of doing law, thereby initiating the transformation of “Islam law” into a state law. This also meant that the autonomous and socially grounded Islamic legal profession was displaced by the corporate and ultrasocial agency of the state. The overall result was reengineering the Shariʿa (as well as Hindu “law”), rendering it a sort of replica of English law, what became known as “Anglo-Muhammadan Law.” And with this transformation, the new state institutions and methods of governance broke up the communal structures as a first step toward fashioning the nation. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 268

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the milgrom/iamond-trade material on how law needs social/market institutions to function, and to the library book on how print ended manuscript-era textual autonomy. — connects to: Anti-sharia laws stripped ordinary Muslim wills and contracts of enforceability — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 277; A court held lack of translation defeated meaningful participation — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 82
• DEFINE: Defines ‘Anglo-Muhammadan Law’ as the British replica of the Shariʿa.