News

We are pleased to announce the publication of the fifth issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Islamic Law, a special issue titled “Governing Islam: Law and the State in the Modern Age.”

We invite you to digitally explore the fifth issue which explores the interplay of the norms of governance and Islamic law in Muslim societies, historically, from the eighteenth to late twentieth centuries, right at the moment when Western colonial powers arose to assert hegemony over the Muslim world. These four essays engage scholarly debates about continuities as well as discontinuities between historical and modern Islamic political–legal paradigms for state laws in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. Within this debate lies the opportunity to reexamine the modern legacies of early Islamic norms for law and governance as they intersected and diverged in novel ways.

This special issue includes an introduction by this Special Issue’s Editor and current PIL-LC Research Fellow, Mohammed Allehbi (Harvard Law School), and essays by Nihat Celik (San Diego State University), Melike Batgiray Abboud (Max Planck Institute), Omar Gebril (Columbia University), and Ovamir Anjum (University  of  Toledo), that investigate the processes by which Muslim and non-Muslim state officials and intellectuals expanded, distorted, and otherwise molded notions of Islamic law and governance under the Ottoman Empire, British colonialism, and the modern state. Each author’s conclusions highlight imperial and local actors’ inventiveness and agency in formulating law and governance in Muslim countries.