ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to explore the nature and implications of the codification(s) of Islamic law. In the scholarship on Islamic law and its history, the codification of Islamic law is often associated with ‘modernity’, legal borrowing and the rise of the nation-state across the Islamic world. The following pages are an attempt to examine the relationships between these terms and processes. The chapter is not a historical survey of the codification of Islamic law in different parts of the Islamic world, although I will refer to concrete examples. Instead, the essay will focus on the conceptual issues that figure prominently in the historiography of Islamic law, mostly in the 19th and the 20th centuries.
