Iza Hussin’s book presents a nuanced, well-written, and novel approach to the study of Islamic law. Tracking the transformation of Islamic law from India in the 1770s to Malaya and Egypt in the 1870s, she explores how Islamic law “as a contingent and constructed political space” (p. 9) was made and unmade during the British colonial period in Malaya, India, and Egypt. She does so through the study of divisions of jurisdiction, treaties signed between British and local rulers, trials that helped define Islamic law, and portraits and texts.

Hussin justifies her selection with reference to the interdependence rather than the independence of her three case studies. This design allows her both to show how legal concepts that developed in India shaped the making and unmaking of Islamic law in Malaya and Egypt and to argue for the centrality of India in the reconfiguration of Islamic law. Hussin thereby shows that the development of Islamic law during the colonial period was not a one-directional process directed from the heartlands of the Arab world to the fringes. The increased exchange between India, Malaya, and Egypt was facilitated by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, new technologies, and the movement of British judges and colonial officials. Hussin is less concerned with establishing causality, and her work seems to suggest that we learn most when we take the interconnectedness of our cases as a given and focus on the effects of these relations and networks. Comparative studies on Islamic law are rare, and Hussin’s work makes a compelling case for a comparative, interdisciplinary turn in the study of Islamic law that addresses wider questions prevalent in political science, history, and law.

Hussin analyzes the way in which Islamic law changed during the colonial period. She states that, through processes of negotiation between British colonial and local elites, Islamic law was integrated into the state system and limited to a narrow area: family law. Hussin characterizes this process as secularization. Secularization for her means not only the separation of state and religion but also that the state defines the place and scope of religion. This argument builds on the work of other scholars, most prominently Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 2003). The remaking of Islamic law had important implications for who was in charge of reform and how the reform of Islamic law would happen in the future. The acceptance of state control over the definition and scope of Islamic law is an outcome of that process. Hussin counters the view that legal reform in the colonial period can be considered a mere imposition by colonial authorities. Instead, she emphasizes the role of local elites, who gained new resources and opportunities in the process. Hussin thereby consciously restores the agency of local elites that is often omitted in the work of Talal Asad.

Hussin’s innovative comparative approach is further substantiated by her novel use of a variety of sources, such as treaties and archival material in Malay, Arabic, and English, to track the remaking of Islamic law. She argues that a narrow understanding of the study of “law as rules and institutions” (p. 25) and of change in legislation alone provides an incomplete picture of legal reforms under colonial authorities: “This approach obscures the fact that the most significant changes that have occurred in Islamic law throughout the Muslim world are not to its substantive rules but to their application as part and parcel of the repertoire of the state” (p. 25).

In colonial Malaya the autonomy of local elites was limited to matters of religion and culture. This led to what Hussin terms the “paradox of Islamic law” (p. 236): the institutional marginalization of Islamic law at the hands of the colonial state was accompanied by its symbolic centralization as a source of authority and legitimacy for state elites. Religion and culture became contested spaces precisely because local elites’ authority had been limited to them, so that an expansion of what can be classified as religion and culture meant expanding the authority of local elites. Tensions over what fell under the scope of religion and culture lead to unclear and contested jurisdiction, which also plays out in contemporary Muslim jurisdictions, as Hussin demonstrates with respect to the adjudication of apostasy cases in present-day Malaysia. Hussin makes a compelling case that we have to take history seriously if we want to understand law in the contemporary period. She emphasizes that calls for an imposition of Islamic law through codified state law are effectively calls for Islamic law as the construct that emerged during the colonial period.

The concluding chapter discusses Islamic law in contemporary Malaysia by drawing on two apostasy cases. In the case of Lina Joy, the High Court of Malaysia ruled in 2001 that a Malay citizen cannot renounce his or her religion. The post-independence constitution defines a Malay citizen as Muslim. Hussin shows how these identity conflicts can be traced back to the colonial period. The Pangkor Engagement of 1874 rendered possible the conflation of Muslim identity and Malay ethnicity by establishing the autonomy of Malay sultans over religion and culture. In the process, Islamic identity and Islamic law became sources of legitimacy for these elites (pp. 239–40).

Hussin focuses on how the system and organization of Islamic law changed, rather than on concrete changes in individual norms. For example, she states that the matriarchal laws of the Minangkabau of West Sumatra began to be replaced by more patriarchal adat temenggong, and the British interpretations of Islamic law from India came to be accepted legal practice for some areas of Malay religion and custom such as marriage and divorce (p. 86). But she does not say much about what these matriarchal laws were or how and why they changed. She appears to accept that, when the system of how Islamic law operates changed, by default the application of individual norms also changed. This position builds on Wael B. Hallaq’s work (An Introduction to Islamic Law, 2009), which argues that the codification of Islamic law and the integration of Islamic law into state law led to a radical break in how the shariʿa operates. However, this assumption should be treated as an empirical question that requires further investigation when it comes to the concrete application of individual norms. In addition, changes might be greater in some areas of Islamic law than in others.

A comparison that moves beyond changes in the system of Islamic law and looks at how different provisions of Islamic law, especially in family law, were applied before and after the colonial period and in particular before and after codification, will complement Hussin’s work. It will also help evaluate how great the break between the pre- and postcodification periods was and avoid the drawing of sharp distinctions between a liberal past and a patriarchal future or vice versa. Hussin’s thoughtful analysis is thus a call for more comparative work in Islamic law.