Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue Scholarly Debates: Moving Past Structural Death

Abstract

This special issue explores the interactions between Islamic law and other legal traditions during the modern period, particularly in the contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and centralized bureaucratic states from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. The three essays in the issue contribute to the ongoing scholarly debates that present contrasting views on the fate of sharīʿa during this period. Between the two sides of this debate, there is a space ripe for exploring the fitness and movement of Islamic law in the contested period between tradition and modernity.

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