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Chapter 42 - Battle of the Qāḍīs

Excerpt from the Novel Sulttānvīṭu by P. A. Muhammad Koya (d. 1990)

from Part VI - Alternative Sources for Islamic Legal Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2024

By
Mahmood Kooria
Edited by
Omar Anchassi  and
Robert Gleave
Omar Anchassi
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
Robert Gleave
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

This chapter focuses on two passages from a historical novel in Malayalam, titled Sulttānvīṭu by P. A. Muhammad Koya (d. 1990), set in a Muslim matrilineal household in Calicut on the Malabar coast of southwest India. The first passage deals with a dispute between two groups on the appointment of a judge (qāḍī) and the right to carry out the Friday congregational prayer (in the early 20th century), while the second one involves two public debates in the wake of Wahhābism’s arrival in the region. Broadly speaking, the novel explores the gradual disintegration of the matrilineal tradition among Malabar Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the peak of colonialism, reformism and modernism.

Keywords

MatrilinyCustomary lawIndian OceanModernismReformismColonialismFriday prayer (jumuʿa)Judge (qāḍī)Inheritance (mīrāth)Religious authorityWahhābism.
Type
Chapter
Information
Islamic Law in Context
A Primary Source Reader
 , pp. 434 - 448
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Primary Sources

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh. Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭūṭa: Tuḥfat al-Nuẓẓār fī Gharāʾib al-Amṣār wa-ʿAjāʾib al-Asfār, ed. al-ʿUryān, Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Munʿim and al-Qaṣṣāṣ, Muṣṭafā (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-ʿUlūm, 1987).Google Scholar
Muhammad Koya, P. A. Sulttānvīṭu (Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Academy, 1992 [1972]).Google Scholar

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Osella, Caroline. ‘Desires under Reform: Contemporary Reconfigurations of Family, Marriage, Love and Gendering in a Transnational Matrilineal Muslim Community’, Culture and Religion 13 (2012), 241–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prange, Sebastian. Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sebastian, Aleena. ‘Matrilineal Practices among Koyas of Kozhikode’, Journal of South Asian Studies 1 (2013), 66–82.Google Scholar

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