In the Name of a Law
Islamic Legal Modernism and the Making of Afghanistan's 1923 Constitution
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8965671 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Faiz Ahmed (0000-0002-9349-0525, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 655-677 |
| Publication date | 2016-09-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0020743816000817 |
| OpenAlex | W2526549671 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 37 |
In 1919, a new amir in Afghanistan named Aman Allah Khan launched an ambitious campaign to reorder his government into a constitutional monarchy. By 1923, Afghanistan had ratified its first constitution, supplemented by scores of legal and administrative codes. Whereas the latter have long been attributed to European borrowings or Kemalist imitation, this article uncovers two neglected features of Aman Allah's reformist project to argue that the making of Afghanistan's 1923 Constitution presents a distinctive path of state building in the region: Islamic legal modernism. First, by upholding the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence as the basis of Afghan substantive law, Amir Aman Allah sought a cohesive national judiciary through the codification of fiqh , not European civil law. Second, by synthesizing the expertise of a diverse cast of Muslim scholars and professionals—from Afghan clerics to Ottoman and Indian technocrats recruited to Kabul—he attempted to avert a rift between “Islamic” and “secular” lawmaking
Afghan · Constitution · Fiqh · Islam · Jurisprudence · Political science · Sharia · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
The Mecelle, Sharia, and the Ottoman State
Ottoman Nizamiye Courts
The Politics of Islamic Law
Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition
Contingency in a Sacred Law
Islamic Law and the State
An Introduction to Islamic Law
The Making of Salafism
Modern Islamic Political Thought
The Second Formation of Islamic Law
Men of Order
Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge
Formations of the Secular
Islam and Constitutionalism in Afghanistan
The Ottoman and Islamic Substratum of Turkey's Swiss Civil Code
Between Identity and Redistribution
The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1989 Edition)
The impossible state
The Mecelle, Sharia, and the Ottoman State
Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age
Modern Islamic Political Thought
The place of Shi'i clerics in the first Iranian constitution
The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality
The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |