This book is a study of the Muslim world’s entanglement with colonial modernity. More specifically, it is an historical examination of the development of the long-standing, indigenous tradition of learning and praxis known as Islamic law (shariʿa, fiqh) as a result of its imbalanced interaction with new European modes of knowing during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the colonial experience. Drawing upon the writings of jurist-scholars from the Ḥanafī school of law writing in Cairo, Kazan, Lucknow, Baghdad, and Istanbul, Transformations of Tradition reveals several central shifts in Islamic legal writing that throw into doubt the possibility of reading its later trajectory through the lens of a continuous “tradition.” By focusing especially on the work of Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī, Mufti of Egypt for a time and a leading scholar at the Azhar, Transformations of Tradition shows that the colonial moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a significant rupture in how Muslim jurists understood history and authority, science and technology, and religion and the secular, thereby upending the very ground upon which Islamic law had until then functioned.

The Conclusion considers the Egyptian intellectual landscape from the perspective of the last Shaykh al-Islām of the Ottoman Empire, Muṣṭafā Ṣabrī. Upon his exile from Istanbul, Ṣabrī spent a short time living in Egypt, concluding that the country had become thoroughly Europeanized. Relying especially on the theological question of free will and predestination, Sabri argued that Egyptian writers’ inclination toward a free will position was an indicator of European dominance. European thinkers had indeed criticized Muslims for being too deterministic in their evaluation of the question; the remainder of the Conclusion examines Egyptian responses to these critiques. Among them was a lecture given by Muḥammad Bakhīt which stressed human agency in the world, an analysis of which once more lays bare Bakhīt’s domestic rivalry with Reformist figures, his reliance on the transregional “social madhhab” in crafting modern solutions, his mode of responding to the challenges posed by colonialism, and his subjection of Ḥanafī tradition to transformation.

Chapter 3 considers what precisely it means to say that Bakhīt is a colonial figure. Given that this book places his ideas within the context of a modernity conditioned by the specter of colonialism, this chapter uncovers how colonialism figures in his writings. Examining his contributions to a new genre of literature that attempted to harmonize Islam and modern science, I argue that Bakhīt fits squarely within a colonial discourse premised on what Homi Bhabha has called mimicry. For Bhabha, mimicry does not mean a complete capitulation, but rather is indicative of an ambivalence and partiality characteristic of the native subject whose difference from the European always looms over the encounter. Bakhīt’s writings, then, constitute a partial discourse in which he at once reaffirms the modern scientism of the colonizing power and asserts an independent Arab-Islamic civilization with an illustrious past that is available for reactivation.

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A host of recent events – well known to all and not in need of rehearsal here– have had, among a variety of other consequences, the unexpected effect of focusing the world’s attention on the diversity of Muslims and the Islamic tradition.The constant talk of “Sunni triangles,” “Shi`ite clerics,” and “Wahhabiradicals,” however, raises important questions about what precisely dividesthe Muslim community along these lines. For Ayoub, the roots of this sectarianismcan be found, at least in part, in the crucial historical time periodknown as the Rashidite (or “Rightly Guided”) caliphate. It is the “politicaland socio-religious crisis” (p. 4) of this era (stretching from the death of theProphet until `Ali’s assassination) and its implications for subsequent generations,that form the subject matter of this book.Ayoub envisions his work as filling a void found in most general introductionsto Islam, which for all their other merits, often fail to provide a clearaccount of this formative period of Islamic history. As for those who haveventured to write in the area, Ayoub considers the works of both Muslim andwestern scholars to be fraught with the political and theological biases oftheir authors. His desire to avoid this pitfall motivates him to adopt thenovel approach of letting the “primary sources of Muslim thought and history”(p. 4) speak for themselves, a tack not unlike the one he uses in hisimportant contribution to tafsir studies: The Qur’an and Its Interpreters.Using this methodology, Ayoub seeks to construct and present a balancedaccount of the major historical events of the Rashidite era in an effortto explore the interaction between considerations of religion and politics inearly Islamic understandings of the nature of authority. His analysis of thevarious claims to the caliphate advanced by Abu Bakr, `Umar, `Uthman,and `Ali, as well as by less successful contenders, is aimed at supporting hiscentral assertion that because “the Prophet died without leaving a clearpolitical system” (p. 22), the Companions did not agree – indeed they vehementlydisagreed – on answers to questions of political authority: ...