Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Assistant Professor in History at the National University of Singapore, speaks to a wider audience than just legal historians. As she explores manifestations of and dynamics related to legal pluralism in the colonised Malay world with an emphasis on the role of the Arabs, in Fluid jurisdictions Yahaya addresses questions of bureaucratisation as much as identity; race and gender relations; secularisation and Islamisation; resistance to and embrace of colonialism and imperialism.
The book is structured in six substantial chapters, sandwiched between an Introduction and Conclusion. If the six chapters are short (around twenty pages each, making them good also for classroom use), the Introduction is far longer than one might expect. That being said, it elegantly charts the themes, explains legal terms, and portrays the historical context, while interweaving references to the following chapters. Scholarship on the Arab diaspora in the Indian Ocean has received attention in waves, and in the Introduction Yahaya also takes some time to illustrate how her work is different from previous publications. The one point of agreement of all authors working on the Arab diaspora is the need to think about space expansively, and indeed Fluid jurisdictions compares and intertwines narratives and stories from Yemen, the British Straits Settlements and across the Dutch East Indies.
As Yahaya states at the beginning, the book intends to ‘demonstrat[e] how British and Dutch territorial jurisdictions expressed very specific relationships between territory, authority, and forms of law, and it simultaneously puts into stark relief the preponderance of diasporic Arab merchants generating their own jurisdictions across the Indian Ocean in tandem with those of the European colonists’ (p. 3). Hence, while acknowledging the role of colonial authorities in creating the infrastructure for colonial jurisdiction in Southeast Asia, Yahaya identifies ‘colonial subjects themselves’ as ‘a significant driving force behind [its] expansion’ (p. 3) and as key players in the colonial ‘accumulat[ion of] legislative power’ (p. 163).
But it was not simply any or all subjects who held such power. Rather, only the Arabs were able to shape colonial jurisdiction in the Dutch Indies and British Straits Settlements, as they capitalised on their identity and position. As a diaspora, they saw their engagement with state bureaucracy as both ‘a way to gain trust’ (p. 16) from the colonial administrators, and as an avenue to protect their families and property. As a non-indigenous group, despite differences between the Dutch and British territories, in both contexts their origin in the homeland of Islam turned Arabs into a religious elite connected to both the Muslim local population and the colonial administration. Through these dynamics, the Arabs of Southeast Asia were able to both leverage colonial laws to protect their financial interests, and to ‘displac[e] indigenous jurisdictions’ in favour of their own interpretation of Islamic family law (p. 29).
Three of the six chapters focus on specific legal tools, looking at their deployment in the British Settlements, their ramifications in the Dutch Indies, and their respective impact on the shaping of Islamic law in colonial (and ultimately postcolonial) Southeast Asia. Chapter 1, ‘The lure of bureaucracy: British administration of Islamic law in the Straits Settlements’, focuses on the Arabs’ use of petitions in the second half of the nineteenth century to ‘advocat[e] for themselves’; taking advantage of ‘racial prejudice, chauvinism, and class disparity’ (p. 34) the Arabs were able to direct Muslim legal affairs in the British possessions, marginalising the role of adat and local interpretations of Islamic law. Chapter 2, ‘Surat kuasa: Powers of attorney across the Indian Ocean’, deploys the lens of the power of attorney as a tool at the junction of colonial law and subjects’ rights, one that facilitated the Arabs’ control of their assets for inheritance, management of their property during periods of travel, and to circumvent limits imposed by the Dutch on land ownership by ‘Foreign Orientals’. Lastly, chapter 6, ‘Compromises: The limitations of diasporic religious trusts’, takes the waqf as a tool to protect the diaspora's capital and property through colonial jurisdiction (p. 142). Understood to be a charitable endowment guaranteed in perpetuity for the common good of the Muslim community, the waqf was often used by Arabs in the Settlements as a way to dispose of their wealth at the time of death, avoiding tax and benefiting their extended diasporic families; the British obviously had major issues with this, and went to great lengths to dissociate the waqf from British framings of ‘charity’. Looking at the waqf at the intersection of Islamic and British laws, then, this chapter concludes this part of the book with an exploration of Arab engagement with colonial courts as they aimed at positioning themselves no longer as sojourners or migrants, but as residents of the colonies.
Chapters 3 to 5 zoom in on colonial perceptions and understandings of Arab communities in Southeast Asia. Chapter 3, ‘Resident aliens: Exclusions of Arabs in the Netherlands Indies’, explores Dutch colonial stereotypes of Arabs as ‘vultures’, fortune seekers, and exploiters of natives, as grounds for their legal exclusion as ‘Foreign Orientals’ in a race-based legal system. This system was not all-encompassing, however. If Arabs were subject to legislation according to their racial classification in terms of dress and travel restrictions, their businesses were largely regulated according to international law. Chapter 4, ‘Legal incompetence: Jurisdictional complications in the Netherlands Indies’, then builds on this context to explore Dutch concerns over possible insubordination and the risk of ‘juridical slippages’ that might turn Arabs into ‘Europeans’. But while the Japanese and Chinese in the Indies were at times classified as ‘Europeans’, the Arabs were never able to legally assimilate. One sees a connection between these concerns and British practices of surveillance, listing, and counting of Arabs across Southeast Asia during the First World War, which is at the centre of chapter 5, ‘Constructing the Index of Arabs: Colonial imaginaries in Southeast Asia’.
I want to offer one more way of reading Fluid jurisdictions, which is through the lens of gender. Yahaya makes no claims to position this book in the broader field of women's history, however, throughout the book, she integrates invaluable material, opening thought-provoking windows on Muslim women's agency, as well as their legal and social status, across the Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yahaya often points at the prejudices of colonial judges and officers who regularly claimed that Arab women, even when legally in charge of financial affairs or business enterprises, had neither agency or power, depicting them as puppets of their male relatives; in fact, the sources show us that often enough Arab women—whether behind a black face-veil or not, literate or not—knew how to navigate the law, advance their financial interests, and forestall relatives’ attempts at abuse of power or trust (for example, pp. 49–55, 75–80, 155, 170). While I appreciate the scattering of these conversations across the book, it would be interesting to see a journal article bringing them all together.
Overall, Fluid jurisdictions is an important contribution to the fields of Southeast Asian History, Indian Ocean Studies, and Islamic Law, with interesting reverberations for studies of diasporas, women, and colonialism. Yahaya writes in an accessible manner, her sources are rich and well deployed throughout the narrative, making this an engaging read even for those who are unfamiliar with legal history's terminology.
