Islamic law has changed radically in the last 150 years: this paper focusses on the dramatic transformation of Islamic law during the British colonial period in three cases: India, Malaya and Egypt, and its effects in the postcolonial state. It argues that colonial and local elites negotiated the scope, content and meaning of Islamic law in each case, creating new definitions of Islamic law, family, private/public space, ethnic, religious and gender identities. Original archival research shows that Islamic law is a product of political activity, and that legal norms traveled among colonial sites, limiting Islamic law to a narrow scope of private, ‘religious’ law, and defining contemporary possibilities for change. This project presents a new argument: that Islamic law in the contemporary state is a modern construction with important ramifications for ethnic and religious identity, state institutions and elite power in the Muslim world today. This study challenges the prevailing popular view of Islamic law – and Muslim adherence to Islamic law – as a monolith, offering instead a view of Islamic law as locally specific, intensely political, and richly varied.