Nurfadzilah Yahaya's book Fluid Jurisdictions presents an important intervention into current conversations on law, colonialism, and Indian Ocean history. At the same time, it also argues for a more critical approach to the often celebratory historiography of the Hadrami Arab diaspora that has burgeoned into its own subfield over the past two decades. Much of the scholarship produced during this boom in publications on the subject has emphasized themes of mobility and cosmopolitanism, their integration into the upper echelons of “native” sultanates, their position as pan-Islamic envoys or leaders of anticolonial resistance, or the role of Hadarim in transregional religious and scholarly networks. In contrast, Yahaya trains a much more critical eye on the political and economic interests of these Arab elites in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southeast Asia. She also calls attention to the limitations of reigning models of hybridization and creolization, arguing that “there were plenty of Arabs who solely identified as Arabs according to patrilineal descent” (p. 18).

In her examination of the legal history of diasporic Arabs in Southeast Asia, Yahaya's focuses particularly on the legal sphere, where “the Arab elite played a pernicious role in extending an intrusive form of colonial law called personal law” (p. 24). She thus presents “the uncomfortable truth . . . that Arabs in the Netherlands Indies and the British Straits Settlements contributed to the displacement of indigenous jurisdiction” (p. 29). As Yahaya demonstrates over the course of the book, they did so by “instrumentalizing their ethnicity” (p. 29) in asserting religious authority against those of local qadis: “Arabs in the Netherlands Indies and the British Straits Settlements had no qualms about undermining the authority of local indigenous populations vis-à-vis European colonial authorities whenever it suited them” (p. 21). Recognizing this serves to counter common claims to their purported role in anticolonial struggles, which has become disproportionately emphasized in much recent scholarship.

At the same time, Yahaya also makes a critical intervention into interpretations of the role of diasporic Hadarim in the early history of new nation-states in twentieth-century Southeast Asia, arguing that “the Arab elite preserved the contour around the forms left by the colonial state's act of hollowing out local indigenous authority in the colonies” (p. 25). Yahaya's critical reconstruction of colonial legal and social history describes local Muslims becoming increasingly marginalized as diasporic Arab elites worked actively to accelerate the expansion of colonial jurisdiction over the native Muslims of the region. This is strikingly presented through her discussion of the 1875 petition to the British administration of the Straits Settlements expressing the desire of Arab settlers to be “visible” to colonial authorities. This basic argument is convincingly elaborated through detailed critical interrogations of the shifting registers of waqf/trust and surat kuasa/power of attorney. The complex interplay of these concepts across European/common law and Islamic/Malay registers illustrates an important point for understanding the way in which “Islamic law” as we know it has taken shape in the modern world. Wael Hallaq's influential interventions into discussions of law in modern Muslim societies present a powerful analysis of the fundamental ruptures in the epistemic coherence of classical formulations of shariʿa under the coercive transformations of modern state formation. More recent work has gone on to grapple with subsequent Muslim experiments in the interpretation and implementation of Islamic law in diverse postcolonial national contexts. We see this, for example, in Iza Hussin's work charting the rise of colonial administration and the modern state as the primary site for the definition of Islamic law revealing 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” (p. 150). In a similar vein, Yahaya traces the long-lasting political and cultural implications of analogous developments and builds upon critical studies of processes of secularization and the definition of religion as a distinct sphere of modern life, including the insightful work of Hussein Agrama.

Without distracting from Yahaya's significant interpretive interventions, a few historical points made in the course of her argument warrant further discussion and clarification—particularly in her remarks on some of the deeper historical contexts that shaped colonial-era developments. Yahaya writes, “There was no prior conception of adat or Islamic law in the Netherlands Indies and British Straits Settlements before colonial authorities embarked on a mission to ‘discover’ them—on their own for the sake of efficient legal administration” (p. 30). While it is certainly true that the intervention of colonial scholar-administrators did a lot to reify, reframe, and manipulate conceptions of adat that could be deployed to counter the influence of particular elements and the jurisdictional reach of Islamic jurisprudence, there are other precolonial legacies to consider here. For example, at various points in premodern Malay-language legal digests such as the Undang-undang Melaka, two different rulings or penalties for the same offense are often presented as being expressions of adat kanun (established rules) and hukum Allah (the law of God), respectively. Through a number of other Malay works in this genre of legal digest, such counterpositioning of the rules of adat and the law of God is not at all uncommon. Recognition of these earlier models of strategic legal pluralism in Muslim Southeast Asia prompts some reconsideration of the earlier historical contexts that informed the developments discussed in Yahaya's book, as well as the ways in which elements of these traditions were selectively appropriated and exploited by colonial officials, Arab elites, and local legal scholars in attempts to stake out their own claims to authority in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the period covered in this book, Yahaya insightfully demonstrates the mechanics of a complex intercultural legal history as it chronicles the attempts of Arab elites in colonial Southeast Asia to preserve their families, property, and power through strategic engagement with elements of both European and Islamic legal traditions.