The Muslim woman figures as one of the central anchor points of the “Muslim question.” Integrated into a discourse of…
Islam
Conversion marriages: Rethinking categories of religion in colonial India’s courtrooms
Conversion marriages, which always involved litigants who had exchanged their religious self-designations, perpetually mixed up personal law codes and created…
Islamic law from below: Between trust and distrust
Rumee Ahmed’s Sharia Compliant begins with a letter to his Muslim readers. The Arabic term for “letter” is risala, a…
Hacking and intentionality
While Ahmed’s descriptive claim is a compelling deconstructive critique of Islamic law, I think hacking will become an untenable tool…
Islamic law as “code”: Language, system, power
Ahmed situates hacking as faithful work for the Muslim, and also as deeply anchored in Islamic jurisprudential traditions. Fiqh (Islamic…
Law, authority, and tradition
Rumee Ahmed’s Sharia Compliant: A User’s Guide to Hacking Islamic Law is a unique book in that it tackles some…
Hacking and “common sense”
When the ulema in Northern Nigeria did not hack the fiqh but rather simply reproduced medieval codes in greatly reductionist…
Sharia Compliant—An introduction
Observing and participating in Muslim conversations on Islamic law through a decolonial lens led me to see that debate as…
The Muslim Ban and academia
The Muslim Ban—in its current iteration as Proclamation 9645 and in its earlier forms—is certainly an egregious attack on the…
What is scholarship good for?
Beyond calls for more of us to become public intellectuals, what can we do to shift public opinion on issues…