Müller D (2020)
Publication Type: Book chapter / Article in edited volumes
Publication year: 2020
Original Authors: Dominik M. Müller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Edited Volumes: The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology
ISBN: 9780198840534
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198840534.013.16
In the ever-growing corpus of anthropological scholarship addressing Islam and Muslim lifeworlds, comparably few studies centre on the intersections of Islam, law, and state power. This chapter begins with an introduction to some classical legal anthropological works that were influential in fields such as Islamic courtroom ethnography, disputing, and legal pluralism and that reflected on positivistic reconfigurations of the sharia caused by (post)colonial forces, most of which were not overly interested in the state as a core object of empirical and analytic enquiry. The chapter then shifts attention to more recent works that have opened up new directions and dealt increasingly with Islam’s intricate and contingent relationships with law, the state, and wider legal politics in specific contextual settings, factoring in overlapping sovereignties such as marketization in the religious and political field. These studies address, for example, the (trans)formation of sharia norms in corporate workplace settings, halal politics and related state-market dynamics, and the societal workings of state attempts to govern and bureaucratize Islam. They derive their strength from long-term ethnographic endeavours that follow social actors into spheres where they render the sharia meaningful, often in ways that would not immediately be associated with law or legal studies as a result of European-rooted secular distinctions. These and other emerging fields offer sociolegal scholars a range of timely and often understudied avenues for future research that could potentially hold significance for broad readerships within and beyond anthropology and sociolegal studies.
APA:
Müller, D. (2020). Islam, Law, and the State. In Marie-Claire Foblets, Mark Goodale, Maria Sapignoli, Olaf Zenker (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology. Oxford University Press.
MLA:
Müller, Dominik. "Islam, Law, and the State." The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology. Ed. Marie-Claire Foblets, Mark Goodale, Maria Sapignoli, Olaf Zenker, Oxford University Press, 2020.
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