Governing Islam

The scholarship on colonial British India generally portrays law as an instrument of domination and control, employed primarily by colonial officials to subdue the local population. Under the dominant narrative, colonial legal order was imposed in an environment of legal pluralism, wherein multiple normative sources of legal authority existed together, either harmoniously or in a healthy tension. In this story, colonial encounter is conceived as a profound rupture with an inclusive, community-based, pluralistic and flexible pre-colonial past replaced by state-centric, capitalistic enterprise to exploit and marginalize colonized subjects. Julia Stephen’s Governing Islam is a welcome intervention in this narrative of legal hegemony. Professor Stephens investigates the engagements of local populations, particularly Muslim women, with the colonial legal regime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In doing so, she paints the colonial legal terrain as a contested site between locals and colonial officials, rather than as a total, hegemonic

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