ILSS: Sohaira Siddiqui, Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in British India (University of California Press, 2025)

On Tuesday, February 10, 2026, at 12:30-1:30PM US EST via Zoom, Professor Sohaira Siddiqui (Georgetown University) will introduce her latest monograph, Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in British India (University of California Press, 2025), which reexamines long-held assumptions about Islamic law under British rule. The book uncovers how colonial interventions disrupted existing legal traditions while revealing the strategies through which Muslim elites navigated, negotiated, and at times reshaped the new institutions imposed on them. Islamic Law on Trial interrogates the broader project of juridical colonization and shows that, even amid the violent displacement of Muslim legal authority, local actors found ways to articulate, defend, and at times even advance Islamic law from within the colonial judiciary itself. Their efforts produced a paradoxical legal landscape—one that appeared legitimate to both Muslim practitioners and English administrators, while complicating conventional narratives about continuity and rupture and resistance and collaboration. Registration is required.