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Seeing Like an Islamic State: Shari‘a and Political Power in Sudan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Jeffrey Adam Sachs Open the ORCID record for Jeffrey Adam Sachs [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Islamic law, or shari‘a, has been incorporated into the legal systems of many states. In much of the existing literature, this process is understood as part of the colonial and postcolonial state's attempt to render law legible—that is, codified, standardized, and abstract. In this article, I show how some state actors chose to move in the opposite direction, actively discouraging the transformation of shari‘a into a formal and codified system of law. Using the case of colonial and postcolonial Sudan, I argue that these actors viewed legal legibility as a threat to state power, recognizing the jurisgenerative potential of an informal and uncodified law.

Type
Special Issue Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 630 - 651
Copyright
© 2018 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Tamir Moustafa, Andrew March, Khalid Moustafa Medani, and Margot Young for their help in the various stages of this article.

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