To conclude, we trace the trajectory of legal imaginaries of Islam as the religion of the state into the present. Johor was one of the first states in the world to declare Islam the religion of the state; through the Johor constitution, the Malay states, and then the Federation of Malaysia, adopted this formulation. It is here that the formula “Islam shall be the religion of the state,” in legal effect since 1895, has had the longest life. When we re-place Johor into timelines of Islamic constitutionalism, an early and durable adopter of Islamic constitutional language, we gain new understandings of how Muslim legal imaginaries of the nineteenth century worked to make sense of the imperial international, beyond pan-Islamic modernism or decolonial worldmaking. Law’s travels, through cartographic and translational strategies, continued to draw elements of the international and imperial into the making of the Federal Constitution of Malaysia, with important consequences for race, religion, and belonging. The case of Johor shows how the global spread of constitutional thought and the history of Islamic states have been intertwined, and continue to intertwine, into the post-colonial period.

We broaden the scope of discussion, drawing from post-colonial and socio-legal studies, legal history, and the study of Indian Ocean Islam, to explore travelling Muslim legal imaginaries. The book closes with polyphony’s epistemic and political possibilities: a method for reading law, and a response to monist narratives of law and its authority, under empire and in its aftermath. A method attendant to the travels of law is therefore also an approach attentive to the operations of institutional memory and institutional forgetting.The Epilogue brings us into the present, to indicate how a renewed attention to polyphony as method, and as political approach, may be generative of ways to reconsider travelling legal imaginaries in the contemporary Muslim world: their maps and networks, misreadings and translations, and their nested sovereignties.

Here at the end of Part II (Chapters 4-5), we discuss the ubiquity of translation across the broad theatre of Muslim constitutional and legal thought as a provocation for Islamic legal studies, comparative law, and comparative political theory. Translation provides a point of engagement for two broad avenues of engagement among these fields: firstly, in reading Islamic constitutionalism as a global genre of law in motion; and secondly, in critical rereadings of how histories of empire and the international matter for circulating legal imaginaries of Islam.

Chapter Five explores modern Islamic constitutions as texts in translation, and Islamic constitutionalism itself as a global genre of law in motion. For the first time in Southeast Asia, the Ottoman civil code was adopted as law, and the idea of Islam as the religion of the state emerged as a constitutional formulation. The translative processes that occurred once these legal instruments arrived provide insight into how law travels, in space and through time: through translations into local language, institutional orders and hierarchies, and through strategic non-translation and delayed translations into the vernacular. The meaning of Islam as the religion of the state, too, underwent translation, constituting a frame within which the Majalah would be understood. Chapter Five concludes with the travels of Islam as the religion of the state, a constitutional formulation which has had its longest continual existence in Johor. We consider the theoretical significance of this largely forgotten history: for rethinking the global history of modern Islamic constitutionalism and its entanglements with empire, the princely international, race, and the making of the modern Muslim state.

Here at the end of Part I (Chapters 1-3), we revisit the entanglement between the regional, imperial, and international through engagements with the scholarship on cosmopolitanism, the making of international law and the international order, and their continuities and ruptures. Abu Bakar’s itineraries provide a new vantage point on how these entanglements were navigated, and how navigation between regional, imperial, and international orders elaborated and circulated meanings of sovereignty, representation, and recognition.

The Islamic Republic of Iran prides itself on being the only country with an entirely codified Islamic legal system, and on being a pioneer in the Islamization of constitutional law. Part 1 of this chapter provides an overview of the different models of Islamic constitutionalism currently found in the Muslim world. Part 2 reviews Iran’s highly creative and ambitious project of Islamizing an entire civil law system and codifying Islamic law over a forty-year period and draws attention to the high degree of dynamism and reinterpretation of Shiite legal precepts that this project has required. Part 3 focuses on the making and amendment of Iran’s 1906/1907 and 1979 constitutions – which fused foreign, republican, and Islamic elements in unique ways – and on the role of the 1979 constitution in defining and regulating Iran’s distinctive present-day blend of institutional conflict and policy disagreement among religious conservatives, pragmatic reformers, and revolutionary leftists. Over time, a combination of innovative reinterpretation of Shiite legal principles and constitutional and institutional reform have reshaped the complex relationship between left-leaning legislative institutions constrained by Islamic principles and conservative religious scholars who operate outside the political system but are the arbiters of what it means to respect Islamic principles.