[Book Review] Sohaira Z. M. Siddiqui, Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in British India (University of California Press, 2025) | Reviewed by Owais Manzoor Dar

Over the past several decades, the South Asian Muslim intellectual tradition has emerged as a crucial site of scholarly inquiry within the broader academic study of Islam. Historians, anthropologists, and scholars of Islamic law have demonstrated how colonialism, reform, and modernity profoundly reconfigured Islamic thought, institutions, and practices in the subcontinent. A substantial body of scholarship has examined legal debates, religious movements, and institutions such as madrasas, tracing how Muslim scholars articulated authority and normativity under conditions of political subjugation. Yet despite this rich literature, colonial legal institutions, particularly courts and judicial procedures, have often remained unexamined as sites where Islamic law was actively reshaped, contested, and reconstituted. It is precisely this gap that Sohaira Z. M. Siddiqui’s Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in British India (2021) seeks to address.

Yet despite this rich literature, colonial legal institutions, particularly courts and judicial procedures, have often remained unexamined as sites where Islamic law was actively reshaped, contested, and reconstituted. It is precisely this gap that Sohaira Z. M. Siddiqui’s Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in British India (2021) seeks to address.

Drawing inspiration from Talal Asad’s conceptualization of colonialism as producing a “new moral landscape,” Siddiqui extends anthropological and historical inquiry into the juridical domain. Rather than treating law as a neutral administrative mechanism, she demonstrates how colonial courts became central arenas in which moral authority, epistemic legitimacy, and legal sovereignty were negotiated. Her intervention is especially significant because it shifts analytical attention away from purely doctrinal or intellectual histories of Islamic law toward the everyday institutional mechanisms through which colonial power operated. Siddiqui advances an original and theoretically sophisticated argument concerning what she terms the “colonial legal terrain.” This concept refers to a comprehensive juridical space constituted by colonial institutions, administrative apparatuses, judicial practices, and translated legal texts that collectively governed, reshaped, and constrained Islamic law in British India [3]. By foregrounding the legal terrain, itself – rather than merely the ideas circulating within it – Siddiqui offers a powerful framework for understanding how colonial governance transformed Islamic law into a subordinated yet persistently contested domain. In doing so, Islamic Law on Trial bridges colonial history, legal anthropology, and Islamic intellectual history in a manner that significantly enriches contemporary debates on Muslim sovereignty and authority.

Excluding the introduction and epilogue, the book consists of seven chapters organized into two broad thematic sections.

Excluding the introduction and epilogue, the book consists of seven chapters organized into two broad thematic sections. The first section traces the historical construction and expansion of the colonial legal terrain, while the second examines how Muslim legal actors engaged with, contested, and operated within that terrain. The first section comprises three chapters that chart the gradual process of juridical colonization from the seventeenth century to the consolidation of a centralized colonial legal order after the Rebellion of 1857. Siddiqui begins by situating the establishment of the East India Company (EIC) in 1661 and demonstrates how its legal apparatus functioned simultaneously as an instrument of domination and a site of negotiation within what has often been described as “Anglo-Mughal rule.” As the Company expanded territorially, it was compelled to assume administrative and judicial authority. By the late eighteenth century, it emerged as a hybrid entity, operating as an extension of the British Crown while formally acting as the Mughal diwan. With growing support from the British state, the EIC laid the foundations of a centralized and standardized judicial system that governed British subjects, Company officials, and Indians alike. Although Muslims in Company-controlled regions were nominally permitted to seek adjudication under Islamic law in civil matters, the Regulations of 1781 significantly curtailed the authority of courtroom maulvis. Ultimate judicial power was vested in Company judges, producing a structural asymmetry in which Muslim legal actors and litigants were subordinated to colonial authority. Siddiqui shows that while elements of the Mughal judicial system persisted, they survived only in attenuated or incorporated forms within an increasingly dominant colonial legal order. Between 1781 and 1857, the colonial legal terrain expanded through the introduction of new regulations, the restructuring of courts, and – most importantly – the translation of Islamic legal texts into English and the formation of what came to be known as the Anglo-Muhammadan legal canon. Provincial courts were dismantled and replaced by circuit courts, and qaḍis appointed by regional rulers were replaced by English judges [46]. The judicial reforms introduced by Lord Cornwallis between 1789 and 1793 further entrenched this transformation. While these reforms widened opportunities for Muslim participation within the colonial judiciary, they simultaneously restricted the independence with which Muslims could exercise legal judgment. The suppression of the Rebellion of 1857 marked a decisive turning point. The Government of India Act of 1858 transferred authority from the EIC to the British Crown and ushered in sweeping judicial reforms. Siddiqui argues that this period witnessed the full realization of the colonial legal terrain through three interrelated developments: the establishment of a centralized judiciary, the standardization of legal codes, and the institutionalization of judicial precedent. These reforms were accompanied by the systematic exclusion of Muslim legal experts, who had previously functioned as courtroom muftis, from formal legal proceedings [54]. Central to this transformation were institutions such as the Calcutta Madrasa (also known as the Mahomedan College) and the colonial project of translating Islamic legal texts. Colonial skepticism toward indigenous educational institutions, particularly madrasas, led to increasing pressure to use English as the medium of instruction and to phase out Arabic, Persian, and Urdu texts [55,56]. Colonial judges, suspicious that Muslim law officers might manipulate legal interpretations to undermine Company authority, increasingly relied on translated and abridged versions of Hanafi legal texts. Siddiqui demonstrates that this mistrust was a major impetus behind the translation movement, which produced texts with a distinctively hybrid character, neither fully Islamic nor entirely English. This body of work came to be known as Anglo-Muhammadan law.

The second section of the book consists of four chapters that examine Muslim participation and intervention within the colonial legal terrain.

The second section of the book consists of four chapters that examine Muslim participation and intervention within the colonial legal terrain. As colonial control over law intensified, the ʿulamāʾ were forced to confront fundamental questions about legal authority and sovereignty. Siddiqui frames their response around a central concern: to what extent were the rulings of colonial courts binding from an Islamic legal perspective? [82]. Drawing on fatwas issued by scholars associated with Deoband, Barelvi, Ahl-i Hadith, and Farangi Mahall, Siddiqui demonstrates the remarkable diversity of Muslim responses to colonial rule. The loss of Muslim political sovereignty generated competing visions of legal legitimacy, most visibly articulated in debates over whether India constituted dār al-Islām or dār al-ḥarb. While the absence of Islamic governance and the marginalization of Islamic law pointed toward dār al-ḥarb, the continued, albeit limited, application of Islamic norms in private and public life supported the classification of India as dār al-Islām [110]. Deobandi scholars rejected the legitimacy of colonial court rulings and insisted that only Muslim judges could validly interpret and implement Islamic law. Barelvi scholars, particularly Ahmad Reza Khan, adopted a more accommodating position by relaxing the requirement that a sharīʿa judge be Muslim, provided that Islamic law itself was applied. Later Barelvi scholars, however, moved closer to the Deobandi position. The founder of the Ahl-i Hadith movement, Sayyid Nazir Husain, emphasized internal reform and advocated borrowing legal opinions across schools to address contemporary challenges. Similarly, Abdul Bari of Farangi Mahall supported the creation of alternative legal tribunals to meet Muslim communal needs [89-111]. Beyond these scholarly debates, Siddiqui introduces the concept of “Muslim lawyering” to analyze how Muslim judges and lawyers navigated colonial courts. Through a detailed case study of Maulvi Mahomed Yusoof, a mufti well versed in Islamic law and a lawyer trained in English law, she illustrates how Islamic legal reasoning was strategically deployed within colonial judicial settings. Siddiqui argues that Muslim judges and lawyers’ engagement exemplifies neither collaboration nor resistance but rather a complex negotiation shaped by both constraint and opportunity.

While Islamic Law on Trial is impressively researched and theoretically ambitious, its interpretative framework raises several questions. Siddiqui’s insistence on reading Muslim judges and lawyers engagement with colonial law as neither collaboration nor resistance is provocative and analytically generative. By resisting binary categorizations, she opens an important space for rethinking Muslim legal agency under colonial rule. Yet this very framing raises concerns about representation, authority, and the normative consequences of such participation. Although Muslim judges frequently contested colonial misreadings of Islamic law and sought to assert interpretive competence with the courtrooms, their participation nevertheless occurred within, and depended upon, the epistemic and institutional architecture of colonial legality. Participation within the colonial legal terrain often required adopting what Talal Asad has described as the “secular discourse of religion,” a discursive formation that reconstitutes religious traditions as bounded, text-centered and subject to state regulation. In operating within this framework, Muslim legal actors were not merely defending Islamic law; they were also translating it into categories legible to the colonial state. The normative stakes of this participation in colonial courts could function as a meaningful intervention, challenging orientalist distortions and asserting interpretative authority, such engagements also raises concerns about the long-term implications for Islamic legal sovereignty. To what extent did participation in colonial adjudication reshape Islamic law in ways not internally generated by the tradition itself? If legal reasoning was increasingly framed through procedural, evidentiary and codificatory norms derived from colonial jurisprudence, then the center of gravity of the tradition may have shifted from the inherited discursive practices of the fuqahā’ to the bureaucratic rationality of the modern court. In this respect, one might argue that certain judicial readings of Islamic law in the colonial courtroom operated at the margins of the tradition rather than from within its core methodological commitments. The issue is not whether these judges were sincere or learned, but whether the institutional conditions of colonial adjudication subtly reoriented by the very composition of legal reasoning.

Despite these concerns, Islamic Law on Trial represents a major contribution to the study of Islam, law, and colonialism. Siddiqui offers a richly textured account of how Islamic law was transformed through colonial judicial institutions and how Muslim scholars, lawyers, and judges responded to this transformation. By foregrounding courts as sites of moral and epistemic struggle, she bridges intellectual, legal, and colonial histories of South Asian Islam. The book’s greatest achievement lies in its nuanced portrayal of Muslim agency under colonial rule. Siddiqui avoids reductive binaries of resistance and collaboration and instead reveals the paradoxical dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that characterized Muslim participation in the colonial legal system. Her analysis of intra-Muslim debates, particularly among Deobandi, Barelvi, Ahl-i Hadith, and Farangi Mahalli scholars, illuminates the deep fractures and competing visions of sovereignty and authority that emerged in colonial South Asia. Islamic Law on Trial demonstrates that colonial modernity did not simply impose a secular legal order but provoked new forms of Islamic legal reasoning and ethical self-fashioning. It is a superbly researched and conceptually innovative work that will be indispensable for scholars of Islamic law, South Asian history, and colonial governance.