In Governing Islam, Julia Stephens examines the relationship between Islamic and secular law in South Asia as intertwined systems that emerged as a result of the transformations of colonial rule. The book thus challenges the assumption that Islam is essentially antithetical to secular, modern, and liberal legal regimes, and aims to “show how Indians’ engagements with and subversion of laws co-existed in dynamic tension with a profoundly transformative, and deeply coercive, colonial legal project” (p. 4). It tracks the formation of what Stephens calls “colonial secular governance” involving institutions and discourses that governed British India while demonstrating how it was subverted by Muslims and women whom the colonial officials portrayed as irrational, communal or prejudiced. Stephens argues that “colonial secular governance” operated through a series of binaries “that pitted family against economy, religion against reason and community against the state” (p. 4). These oppositions, mapped onto a larger secular/religious division, nevertheless remained “unstable” and were plagued by ambiguities and contradictions.
The founding argument and strength of the book is the focus on this persistent instability. Stephens is not just content to show how colonial law operated as a tool of domination or Muslim resistance to it; she also illuminates the interface of colonial law with vernacular legal culture and Islamic legal authority, demonstrating a dynamic tension between state law and nonstate legalities. Stephens conceptualizes such a model of governance as the “rubber-band” state, one that “made it a more malleable, and thus powerful instrument of dominance” (p. 14).
Stephens begins by examining the transition to secular legal governance during the first century of colonial rule and how “personal law” was the core organizing principle of colonial law. She traces this transition to both local and global developments in which debates about territoriality, sovereignty, legal historicism, and local customs had a profound impact on legal governance and “proved a powerful means of reconciling conflicting ideological pushes towards uniformity and diversity” (p. 37). Within this perspective, Islamic legal traditions continued to influence commercial and familial disputes and had a broad application, but increasing legal codification by colonial officials eventually narrowed Muslim law to a distinct religious-domestic sphere centered around “personal law.” By historicizing “personal law,” Stephens rightly says that it “is an anachronistic term before the nineteenth century” (p. 33). At the same time, issues about implementing territorial law for British India or lex loci increasingly viewed English law as the universal tradition, devoid of religious underpinnings and necessary for legal reform.
The book prioritizes the colonized subjects, particularly Muslims and women. Legal practice emerges as contentious involving “multiple actors, from litigants to Muslim legal scholars, making secular legal governance a multi-directional and flexible, as opposed to a top-down and rigid, power structure” (p. 58). Emphasizing ambiguity, Stephens shows that several marital disputes were also disputes over property, and the boundary between domestic and economic remained unstable. At the same time, Muslim legal scholars continued to give fatwas on domestic and ritual matters highlighting their important role in the debate about forms of legal practice and religiosity in colonial India. Stephens also demonstrates how the operation of personal law was complicated by custom. Customary law “muddled core divisions, whether between communities or between domestic and economic transactions, that structured secular legal governance” and was selectively applied, she powerfully argues, to favor “patriarchal control over labor and property” (p. 87). Besides marginalizing women's economic rights, such use of custom “actually homogenized rather than diversified family structures” (p. 89).
Methodologically, Stephens reads both the state and nonstate legal documents together to discuss questions of ritual practice and highlights a rich archive in which individuals advocated different approaches in Islamic jurisprudence to debate ijtihad and taqlid. Revising our understanding of nonintervention of the colonial state and it's supposed neutrality, she says, “by constructing ritual as a matter of personal belief the courts prevented Indians from mediating these disputes through legal channels, whether within or beyond the state” (p. 108). The consequences of this were profound as it intensified intracommunity disputes and conflicts and “effectively encouraged the formation of break-way sects while limiting Muslims’ ability to manage the resulting social fallout” (p. 130).
Moving to the twentieth century, Stephens looks at the controversy over the publication of Rangila Rasul, a tract about the domestic life of Prophet Muhammad, that evoked large-scale Muslim protests when the judge acquitted the author of any wrongdoing instead of punishing him. Moving beyond the caricature of Muslim fanaticism, she explores how Muslim sentiments intersected with debates about law and religious freedom, and how public grief after the murder of Rajpal and the execution of the accused, Ilmuddin, in 1929 achieved a “delicate consensus” involving a “vision of religious sentiment that empowered intercommunal collaboration” (p. 152). She also addresses trends in economic thought including Islamic socialism and “Islamic economics,” and debates in several genres during the deliberations on Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Act of 1937.
Governing Islam provides a sophisticated analysis on critical questions about Islam, secularism, and law during the colonial period. The book could have used more female voices in Islamic jurisprudence, but this does not minimize the significance of Stephens's intervention in South Asian historiography.
