The 2013 publication of Wael Hallaq's landmark work The Impossible State introduced a powerful analysis of the fundamental ruptures in the epistemic coherence of classical formulations of shariʿa under the coercive transformations of modern state formation. This has led to energetic and productive debates among historians and scholars of Islamic jurisprudence. It has also presented new challenges in grappling with a range of subsequent modern Muslim experiments with the interpretation and implementation of “Islamic Law” in diverse postcolonial national contexts. Iza Hussin's book delivers constructive and stimulating new work toward understanding some of the ways in which “Muslim elites capitalized upon negotiated, and reinterpreted the realities of colonization” to “provide a way to understand contemporary Muslim investments in Islamic law as state law” (150, emphasis in original), in a phrasing that recalls and reverses that of Clark Lombardi's work on a later period of Egyptian legal history (State Law as Islamic Law, 2006).

Hussin pursues her own project here through a series of examinations of the impact of British colonialism on legal and political reconfigurations of Islam in three societies: Malaya, India, and Egypt. These three examples are, moreover, not treated as parallel case studies, but rather as interconnected sties of interaction among colonial, Islamic, and local systems (226). Looking across this broad vista, Hussin develops the argument that the increasing prominence of “Islamic law” in public discourse and political debate was driven by both the new definitions and delineations of this field by colonial regulations, and by their active appropriation by Muslim elites in each of these societies. In this, she presents a nuanced history of Islamic law in terms of both challenges and opportunities presented to Muslim elites under colonial rule, revealing how the consequences of decisions and strategies formulated in those contexts continue to inform important events today.

Hussin's work charts the rise of the modern state as the primary site for the definition of Islamic law, and traces the long-lasting political and cultural implications of these developments. Along the way she casts new critical light on the ways in which both British and Islamic law developed in tandem within contexts of European imperial expansion. She also develops a stimulating line of analysis on British colonial invocation of “ruler's discretion” under the rubric of siyasa in ways that differed from earlier Muslim practice in India, resulting in the transformation of shariʿa “as codified law in a limited but symbolically central domain” (177). This, Hussin argues, resulted in a reification and flattening of Islamic law as a contested sphere of meaning and identity at the core of modern Muslim sensibilities. In her own words: “the institutional marginalization of Islam and its elites set into motion a new series of strategic negotiations that transformed Islamic law and made its delivery central to the legitimacy of the state” (33).

Although she narrates these transformations across three cases, the real strength of her story comes from her nuanced historical discussions of Malaya, where she draws on an extensive body of archival records in both Malay and English. In the last chapter, Hussin brings her argument forward to demonstrate the ways in which the effects of Colonial Era transformations continue to inform contemporary politics of Islam in independent Malaysia. Her work here provides an illuminating discussion of the complex entanglements of religion and ethnicity that continue to animate highly fraught debates on Islamic law in that country today.

Hussin's narrative of the development of modern bureaucracies of Islamic law—and the concomitant emergence of new kinds religious authorities and legal professionals—builds upon critical studies of processes of secularization and the definition of religion as a distinct sphere of modern life, and its relation to the rule of law. Here, Hussin draws on Talal Asad's seminal interventions into critical studies of the secular (Formations of the Secular, 2003), and in particular Asad's analysis of secularization as a historically specific project effected by state power. There are also references to the more recent work of Hussein Agrama (Questioning Secularism, 2012), but the insights developed in the latter's critical extension of Asad's thought—which could have helped to further develop some of Hussin's own lines of argument in this book—are, unfortunately, not substantially developed. In one case in which there is direct engagement with Agrama's work, it is actually conflated with that of Asad in Hussin's in-text misattribution of a large block quotation on pp. 197–98 (cf. 301, n.20). This is, unfortunately, just one example of issues with missing references/incomplete bibliographic citations and repetitions that should have been addressed during the editorial process. These quibbles should not, however, distract one from appreciating the important contributions that Hussin's work makes toward a more broadly contextualized historical analysis of the modern politics of Islamic law. I would recommend this book highly to legal historians, as well as historians of colonialism, and anyone interested in modern dynamics of Islam and Muslim politics.