ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the rupture in the Sharia law and order regime that took place in the Muslim colonies, in which local rulers and assistants played an important role as intermediaries in the making of the colonial legal modernity.1 Although the national legal framework of the “mother countries” was often decisive for the shape Islamic law would take in the colonies, I will focus on a limited number of structural features in which the drastic changes in both the content and conceptualization of the Sharia manifested themselves, and which these different colonial regimes more or less shared.2 The following issues will be treated: the relationship between the law and the political and economic framework; the ensuing “framing” of Sharia and customs in the overall structure of state law, its resulting legal pluralism, and the conceptualization of Islamic law; the application of Islamic law through transformed or new legal institutions such as a judicial hierarchy; the accompanying forms of writing and textualization on normativity; and the dialectical relationships between European modernity and its representatives and Islamic forms of reform and nationalism. All these developments resulted in a notion of colonial legal modernity and of colonial Sharia. The subsequent understanding of Sharia as “Islamic law” forms the basis of contemporary Islamic legal systems and underlies the focus on the relationship between theory and practice in the academic study of Islamic law.
