The Endurance of Fiqh in an Age of Sharīʿa: Islamic Law in Late Colonial Sudan

Abstract

This dissertation explores Islamic law and reform in colonial Sudan. It relocates study of the period from state judiciaries and reformist polemics, both well attested to in the literature, to the learning circles of Sudan’s Mālikī school of law (madhhab). It focuses on three scholars active in that country’s mid-twentieth century: ʿUthmān b. Ḥasanayn Barrī al-Jaʿalī (d. 1960), Muḥammad al-Amīn al-Shinqīṭī (d. 1974), and Abū Ṭāhir Ḥasan Fāy al-Bijāwī (d. 1984). Through a close reading of their work, oral accounts of their lives, and unstudied biographical notes, this dissertation examines the ways that each attempted to resuscitate a Mālikī tradition beset by colonial reforms from above and revisionist critiques from below. The following chapters contend that their doing so problematizes a number of assumptions common to the study of Islamic law and Africa. Rather than a Sudan indifferent to the legal debates more often associated with Islamic scholarship elsewhere, al-Jaʿalī, al-Shinqīṭī, and al-Bijāwī were deeply invested in contests over law and authority circulating throughout the Islamic World. Their preoccupation with law and particularly legal methodology was not unique. It built on a tradition of Mālikī teaching, scholarship, and jurisprudence (fiqh) in Sudan that stretched back some four centuries. Their scholarship also calls for revisiting Islamic law today. Al-Jaʿalī’s revision of imitation (taqlīd) and al-Shinqīṭī and al-Bijāwī’s use of proof texts (dalīl) present a vision of traditionalism and reform in which neither was exclusive of the other. Their efforts to transform Islamic law from within the madhhab rather than from outside it suggest that the postformative legal tradition was perhaps more resilient – and elastic – than is often supposed. Together they present the case of a madhhab in modernity deeply involved in its own tradition of reform.