Chapter Two - Governing Shariʿa

Summary

Indirect rule was integral to the colonial governance of religion. The state’s intimacy with Muslim elites gave rise to accusations of ‘Muslim sub-imperialism” by Protestant missionaries and other critics who argued that rather than hinging on the separation of the state from all religions, colonial governance entailed the “unblushing bolstering up of Islam.” This chapter argues that indirect rule did not amount to an elevation or even preservation of the caliphal governance ideals. Instead, that mode of governance entailed the transformation of those institutions. Indirect rule was, therefore, not only governance through ‘Islamic institutions,’ but more importantly, it was the governance of those institutions. That governance process culminated in the making of a distinct British colonial Islamic law. That colonial law emerged from the alteration of the precolonial constitutional balance of powers between jurists’ expositions of the Shari’a (fiqh), on the one hand, and political authorities’ jurisdiction over a law (“siyasa”), on the other. This chapter traces that transformation as central to the career of imperial secular governmentality in the colony.