This paper provides a study of an influential sixteenth century fatwa collection, al-Ajwibat al-ʿajībat ʿan al-asʾilat al-gharība, written by the Indian-Malabari Shāfiʿī scholar Zayn al-Dīn al-Makhdūm II (1531-1583). Al- Makhdūm II came from a prominent Hadrami family of religious notables originally from Ma‘bar in Yemen. Al- Makhdūm II worked primarily as a teacher in Ponnani and authored approximately ten books in the fields of Islamic law, theology and Sufism. Al- Makhdūm II is most famous for Fatḥ al-muʿīn bi sharḥ Qurrat al-‘ayn, an abridged version of Ibn Hajar’s Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj bi-sharḥ al-Minhāj, and for Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn fī baʿḍ akhbār al-Burtughālīyīn, a call for jihad against the Portuguese presence. His legal works were influential across the Indian Ocean world, including in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and East Africa. They continue to be taught in many Islamic seminaries, especially those committed to the Shāfiʿī school of law. The legal works of Zayn al-Dīn al-Makhdūm II have been read as evidence of a process of localization or indigenization of Islam in Malabar which some scholars have described as “Monsoon Islam”. These claims have been based primarily on a reading of Fatḥ al-muʿīn. In this presentation, I focus instead on the largely neglected al-Ajwibat, one of the two fatwa collections authored by Al- Makhdūm II. Al-Ajwibat contains 177 questions and answers on issues ranging from ritual questions, family and commerce to interfaith relations and political engagement. The questions were asked by al-Makhdūm II to ten of his Shāfiʿī teachers in the Hijaz, Cairo, and Hadramawt. In this paper I examine how the answers confirm or deviate from central Shāfiʿī legal positions by comparing the fatwas in Al-Ajwibat to those found in the legal manuals of Yaḥyā ibn Sharaf al-Nawawī (1233-1277) and Ibn Hajar al-Haytamī (1503-1566). I focus specifically on fatwas that pertain to local customs and political pluralism. What is the legitimacy of Malabari linguistic conventions in ritual practice and in marriage and divorce? How does non-Muslim rule shape conditions for the lawful appointment of a Muslim qāḍī? To what extent may inheritance rules be influenced by common practices in Malabar? I argue that these fatwas show the scope and limits of indigenization of Islamic law in the context of Malabar and shed light on some of the transformations taking place in the sixteenth century Indian Ocean world due to the emergence of European powers and changing relations between Muslims and Hindus in the subcontinent.

Since the 1990s, Islamic legal historians have explored fatwa collections as a vital source for social and cultural histories. However, the existing historiography on South and Southeast Asian Islamic traditions has largely ignored locally-produced fatwa collections, despite a considerable presence of such texts since premodern centuries. This paper focuses on a few such compilations from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in order to explore the juridical discourses and scholarly interconnections between the Shāfiʿī Muslims of the Indian Ocean littoral between Java, Sumatra, Malabar, Tamil Nadu, Hadramawt, Mecca and Cairo. These texts also help us understand the ways in which these oceanic Muslims engaged with their diverse everyday concerns when they endeavored to follow the ethical-cum-legal expectations of their religion. Many of their specific socio-political contexts, such as living amicably under a dominant non-Muslim polity and sharing the same social fabric with Hindus and Christians, were undiscussed in the hitherto legal texts of the Shāfiʿī school that were mostly written in the Middle East. The shared social dynamics became an increasing concern for jurists among them and they raised these issues to their colleagues and teachers elsewhere in the oceanic littoral. The issues varied from ritual purity to inter-religious marriages, extra-marital affairs leading to conversions, consumption of drugs, and disputes over permissible profit vis-à-vis forbidden interest. Taking up the juridical questions and answers related to love and lust, and trade and agriculture among these oceanic Muslims, I shall argue that the very act of questions was expressions of indigenous religious authority and deeper juridical debates, while the answers demonstrated an ongoing socio-cultural and economic continuum between the regions. The paper focuses on three fatwa compilations from sixteenth-century Malabar (Ajwibat al-Zabīdiyya li as’ilat al-Kālikutiyya or “Zabīdī Answers to Questions from Calicut”, Ajwibat al-Malaybāriyya or “Malabari Answers”, and marginally Ajwibat al-ʿajība ʿan al-asʾilat al-gharība, “Wonderous Answers to Rare Questions”), but it compares and connects them with similar works from Jāwī, Patani and Ḥaḍramī contexts where similar fatwas crisscrossed a wider Shāfiʿī cosmopolis of the Indian Ocean world.

The 19th and early 20th centuries have long been characterized as an era of Islamic revival and reform in which new technologies and new trajectories reshaped the ways in which individuals experienced and expressed what being Muslim meant to them. Amidst the era’s clamor of pamphlets, tracts, and travelers’ tales, fatwas (or, Islamic legal opinions) were also part of this landscape of religious connections and community-making. Yet, as anyone who has read collections from this period knows, the concerns that fatwa-seekers voiced were oftentimes extremely local, dealing with particular issues, in particular places, at particular times. How, then, did answering questions about local affairs, minor disputes, and personal concerns contribute to the making of trans-regional religious networks? This paper addresses that question by looking at how fatwa exchanges established connections across the British empire. Focusing on the fatwa-seekers who sought input and advice from one of Delhi’s most prominent muftis from the first-half of the twentieth century, this paper offers close and distant readings of Urdu-language fatwa literature that traveled around the Indian Ocean littoral. How did these writings help itinerant Muslims make sense of the new spaces they experienced? How did they understand the relationship between the communities they left behind and the new communities they inhabited? And how did connections from back home facilitate their settlement abroad? Bringing together distant and close readings of one prolific mufti’s output, this paper uses fatwas to understand South Asian Muslim migrant experiences in the age of imperial circulations. Reading fatwas as texts of migration, I consider these migrants’ turn toward legal correspondence to forge long-distance social and religious ties. The first part of the paper examines the methodology of using legal correspondence (that is, the act of seeking and receiving legal advice through postal and telegraphic networks) to visualize these migrants’ networks, drawing connections between the muftis they consulted and the sources they referenced. The second part of the paper then turns to specific instances in which legal correspondence played a role in navigating and negotiating local disputes between and among South Asian Muslims living in British Burma and East Africa. These disputes not only reveal the role legal correspondence, specifically fatwas, played in the forging of new migrant Muslim communities but also shed light on the contested histories of religious community and belonging within the context of the British Empire in Asia.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pearl trade constituted the main economic activity of the Arabian Gulf. The legal regulation of the pearl trade was complex and layered. Conflicts between pearling actors (divers, captains, merchants) were sometimes settled in local diving courts (sālifa), where experienced merchants from distinguished pearling families officiated as judges. Conflicts could also be settled in other legal forums, including the Emir’s Court, tribal modes of dispute resolution, and the legal institutions of the British Raj. In this legal pluralistic context, Muslim scholars intervened directly in the pearl trade primarily through the production of non-binding fatwas. Since these fatwas were rarely issued in response to questions from divers, the most vulnerable actors in the pearling industry, they inform us primarily about the dilemmas of pious merchants and boat captains. In the first half of the twentieth century nakhodas (boat captains) and merchants reached out to local scholars in the Gulf as well as to muftis in Mecca, Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus. In this paper, I describe the process through which an “undecided configuration of fact” – the religious status of divers when Ramadan falls during the pearling season - acquired a rule (ḥukm) through a set of interpretive acts in the Gulf and the Arab world over the first half of the twentieth century. I draw on four main Arabic sources: an epistolary exchange between the Kuwaiti scholar ‘Abd Allāh b. Khalaf al-Duḥayyān and the Damascene mufti ‘Abd al-Qādir b. Badrān in the 1910s; fatwas issued by Rashīd Riḍā in al-Manār in response to questions from Arab pearl merchants in the 1910s-1920s; a pamphlet published by a scholar from Jubayl, Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Raḥīm al-Ṣiddīqī, in Bahrain in 1942; and a fatwa issued by the newly appointed judge of Qatar, ‘Abd Allāh b. Zayd Āl Maḥmūd, in the early 1940s. I argue that seasonal questions about the divers’ obligations during Ramadan led to broader debates about the economic arrangements that structured the pearl trade, in particular usury and labor coercion. These debates mobilized scholars from different schools and orientations. They reflect shifting power dynamics in the Gulf and the impact of new ideas about Islam and capitalism in the age of print and stream.