“(De)Colonizing Sharia?” Tracing Transformation, Change and Continuity in Islamic Law in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the 19th and 20th Centuries

European colonialism’s encounter with Islamic law or Sharia, the main pillar of the pre-colonial legal systems in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), has had a tremendous impact until today. The implementation of modern European-style legal systems has led, as some scholars claim, to the abolishment of Sharia. Others consider the legal changes through which Muslim societies have transited as a sign of Sharia’s flexibility rather than its demise. The principal question this project addresses is: 

How was Sharia transformed by colonialism? 

The question mark in the project title “(De)Colonizing Sharia?” allows us to deliberately leave open the extent of the continuities, changes or ruptures that characterized Sharia during the colonial and the postcolonial periods and focuses on the processes of transformation. The project relies on extensive archival fieldwork and the intensive reading of texts to investigate the (1) codification/legislation, (2) jurisprudence/legal theory and (3) judicial institutions in seven MENA countries representing diverse forms of the colonial encounter. We focus on the agency of legal actors, provide paradigmatic case studies for comparative evaluation and reflect on the fundamental terminological and theoretical questions underlying how “(De)Colonizing Sharia?” can be adequately grasped, researched and described. 

More broadly, my team and I expect high returns by challenging the scholarship grounded in European terminologies, theory and academic traditions in close cooperation with our colleagues in the MENA region. The project will, thus, break new ground by going beyond current approaches and claims, conducting in-depth and interdisciplinary comparative research on Sharia, and constructing a multivariable database of our outcomes. Its results will be highly relevant for contemporary academic and political discourses in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, and for the emerging field of decolonial legal studies.