Colonialism and Islamic Law 175India, advocated the institutionalisation of ‘sharia governance’ (imarat-i shariyya)
for Muslims. In his numerous writings Sajjad passionately argued that the loss
of Muslim territorial power did not mean that Muslims were no longer obliged
to follow sharia norms. In order to do so they had voluntarily to organise them-
selves in a form of sharia-based self-governance. Hence, there was also a need to
elect an ‘amir of the sharia’ in every state of India to organise the moral life of the
community. After Sajjad’s petitions for constitutionally enshrined fundamental
rights for Muslims had failed, he opted for informally regulated private rights for
his religious group, without affecting the public character of the Indian state.
In this reconfi guration, the character of sharia, apart from a moral law,
was also a bulwark against external interference as well as an instrument for
the political mobilisation of Muslims. Here again sharia became part of the
grammar of the emergent Muslim public sphere, as was the case in Egypt.
Sajjad did not demand the application of Islamic criminal laws, despite the fact
that he proclaimed the revival of the sharia and claimed it was a comprehensive
and total normative order (nizam). Those who wilfully omitted adherence to the
sharia, were, in words, returning to a state of pre-Islamic ignorance (jahiliyya).
This kind of rhetoric differentiating Islam as an ‘order’ or ‘system’ against the
morally unsettling state of jahiliyya as part of Sajjad’s sociological analytic pre-
fi gured another grammar that would later be popularised by fi gures such as
the Pakistani ideologue Abu-l-Ala Mawdudi and later the Egyptian ideologue
Sayyid Qutb.
For Sajjad and many of his successors in the sharia governance movement,
the organised and institutionalised practice of the sharia stood in lieu of the
caliphate. In other words, the sharia was a symbolic empire with a crucial differ-
ence; now one pledged loyalty to a normative (legal) empire, not a territorial empire,
as previously known. Sharia governance, as contemplated by Sajjad, was also a
form of resistance to modernity. One must point out that modern legal systems
were viewed as the fi nal juridical and moral arbiters. Moral norms that were
once located within communities, tribes or extensive kinship networks were
replaced by juridical norms. By keeping certain domains of the law out of the
grasp of state power, as Sajjad suggested, communities could reclaim a certain
level of autonomy by exercising moral power over subjects. Today, the informal
juridical tribunals established by Sajjad continue to fl ourish in a secular India
while simultaneously also establishing indirect linkages with the formal legal
system.
Conclusion
Muslim laws are palimpsests or genetic tissues that reveal the complexity of
the colonial encounters as well as earlier social experiments. Far from simple
one-way exchanges, both the colonial authorities and the colonised subjects