In the first decades of the twentieth century, Mauritanian jurists debated three primary responses to French colonization: armed resistance (jihad), emigration (hijra), or peaceful submission to French rule. Arguments regarding taqiyya, or precautionary dissemblance, are surprisingly prevalent in this debate. Scholars who justified submission to French rule did so in part by citing Qur’an 3:28, which prohibits alliances with unbelievers except as a precaution, to protect oneself; this verse is the primary proof-text for the doctrine of taqiyya. Advocates of hijra rejected this argument in part by distinguishing the Mauritanian context from those circumstances that, to their minds, would allow for legitimate recourse to taqiyya. The role of taqiyya in this debate is surprising for two reasons. First, this doctrine remains overwhelmingly associated with Shi’i populations. Scholars have been keenly interested in the practice of taqiyya among Moriscos, Iberian Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity beginning in 1501-1502, in part precisely because of their Sunn? Muslim identity. Moriscos adhered to Islam in secret but performed normally prohibited actions in public in order to appear Christian and to protect themselves from harm. The Mauritanian debate regarding colonialism provides us with a second clear case of Sunn? taqiyya in the Islamic West, but one that has received almost no scholarly attention. This neglect may be explained in part by the relatively recent publication of the relevant legal texts. Dozens of legal opinions (fatwas), letters, treatises, and poems composed by Mauritanian scholars debating the proper response to French colonialism were made available only with the 2009 publication of al-Majm??a al-kubr?. This modern 12-volume compilation contains approximately 6800 legal texts composed by West African and Saharan M?lik? jurists between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. This rich compilation provides the primary source material for this study. The second cause for surprise, and interest, is that scholar and Sufi leader Sidiyya Baba uses taqiyya as a justification for submission in a prominent 1903 fatw? solicited and distributed by the French. I argue that the French sponsorship of this text challenges contemporary Islamophobic rhetoric that casts taqiyya as a doctrine used by Muslims to facilitate their deceptive, malicious infiltration of Western societies. In this case, France encouraged the embrace of this concept in order to further their own conquest and exploitation of West African societies.

Under the personal law system in the British Raj, the state’s use of religious jurisprudence when dealing with family law subjects like the age of consent and alimony tended to create tensions between advocates for religious freedom and advocates for women’s rights. Authors like Narendra Subramanian and Gail Minault have written extensively on the conflicts that emerged when the colonial government attempted to intervene in Islamic personal law. Members of the ulama, the class of Muslim religious scholars, often found themselves at odds with feminist organizations like the All-India Muslim Ladies’ Conference, as shown by the fierce public debates leading up to the Child Marriage Restraint Act in 1929. However, the issues where the nascent feminist movement in South Asia collaborated with Muslim religious elites has received less scholarly attention, a gap my paper hopes to address. I have identified two cases which problematize the relationship between early Muslim feminists and the ulama: the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937, which limited the role of local custom in Muslim family law cases, and the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939, which incorporated Maliki grounds for women-initiated divorce into all Muslim divorce cases across British India. Debates around both of these Acts occurred as Muslim elites grappled with the idea of an independent Pakistan and their published discourses indicate that, despite their differences, feminists and jurists alike were preoccupied with the idea of preserving their group identity. Through collecting and analyzing editorials, letters to the editor, and speeches by both women active in the Muslim feminist movements and religious scholars about the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937 and the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939, I demonstrate that rather than being wholly ideologically opposed as they have previously been portrayed, Muslim feminists and ulama worked in tenuous and constantly shifting coalitions in order to advance what they perceived as shared Muslim interests in the increasingly sectarian environment of 1930’s British India.

Given the history of loss, displacement and violence, national narratives in the Middle East and North Africa have drawn on themes of loss and violence in intense ways. In the last several years, there has been a substantial amount of scholarship addressing the relationship between violence and memory in nationalist narratives. Despite this emphasis on collective memory, few studies have evaluated the role of women’s memories in state formation in the Middle East, instead focusing on sites of memory that commemorate sacrifice and bravery as part of the larger nationalist project and its claim to universalism. The official version of Libyan nationalism under the government of Muammar el Gaddafi attempted to highlight the valiant struggle of the Libyan people against Italian colonialism, as embodied by figures like the resistance leader Umar al-Mukhtar. Despite the claim of universalism inherent in this official ideology of resistance, its iconic imagery is almost always centered on the masculine figure of a Bedouin fighter. Similarly, colonialism is conventionally understood as a masculine, and at times violent, interaction between male Italian colonists, soldiers and administrators, and colonized men. This paper expands the gendered analysis of violence and memory by exploring the ways in which Libyan women remembered Italian colonial rule between 1911 and 1943. Drawing on oral history narratives collected by the Libyan Studies Center in Tripoli and literature written by Libyan women, it explores the way in which women participated in the contested meanings of Libyan history during the colonial period, under the post-colonial monarchy, and then under the government of Muammar el Gaddafi. It argues that women constructed their own unique, albeit fragmented, understandings of Libyan history and of the colonial period that undercut supposedly universalist narratives of Libyan national liberation and development. Instead of placing women at the margins or excluding them completely, women emerge as central to the history of the region as both actors and preservers of memory. Their voices unsettle traditional masculine nationalist narratives with their emphasis on the courageous nature of the (masculine) founders of the Libyan state.

Contemporary attempts to articulate a history of Islamic law necessarily make one of two assumptions: either that Islamic legal discourse 1) can codify and systematize – completely, seamlessly, and without mediation – universal, divine truths accessible in all circumstances across time; or 2) articulates, even where derived hermeneutically or analogically from a divine source or set of principles, the contingent opinions (fatawa) of necessarily fallible scholars that together produce an intrinsically pluralist, dynamic, and evolving set of discursive traditions. I will call the former position “positivist” and the latter “pluralist,” noting the historicity of epistemological skepticism across disciplines in the Muslim world and its continuities with post-structuralist and critical theory. This paper argues that the longstanding cohabitation in the Muslim world of multiple legal discourses predicated on sometimes conflicting principles (for instance, social utility versus an individual ethical injunction, or an individual right versus a social proscription) and produced by state and non-state actors stands opposed to the positivist vision of law with the state as its single, autonomous, sovereign source and executor. I further argue that the scholarly production of fiqh in the Islamic world must be understood as a dimension of civil society seemingly external to but nonetheless inflecting the mechanism of state legislation and thus the social production of the state. Especially given the range and flexibility of its concepts – from collective subjectivity to privacy, utility and welfare to individual ethics, social justice to property rights – Islamic law, as a decentralized, varied, but always potentially authoritative discourse within and outside the state, may serve as a tool against the concentration of not just political and military, but also social and economic power in and through the state. Indeed, the insistence in Islamic law on the circumstantial and social nature of agency and thus judgment has the potential to underwrite more explicitly collective forms of subjectivity in the postcolonial Muslim state. The political recognition of fiqh as a counter-balance to siyasa shar?iyya poses numerous risks – but so, too, does a liberal legal regime centered on the individualized subject interpellated by a state, even if more or less democratic. At this moment in history, the question must be expanded beyond the simple binary between incorporating and dismissing Islamic law in the postcolonial states of the Muslim world; it is how to historicize, re-appropriate, and evolve its open, intrinsically dynamic traditions towards the ends of pluralism, social justice, and freedom from domination.