Sharī‘a Incorporated: Figuration, Performativity, and Religious Contestations over Corporate Power

This article interrogates the religious personality of the corporation through a case study of Islamic banking in Pakistan. Departing from Eurocentric genealogies that trace corporate personhood to Christian political theology, I examine how Deobandī Muslim jurists sanctioned Islamic banks as rights-bearing persons under the Sharī‘a. Whereas proponents justified accommodating corporations by locating their “likenesses” (naẓā’ir) in the Sharī‘a, critics argued that corporate personhood and limited liability violated the Sharī‘a’s commitment to distributive justice. Drawing on these Deobandī debates, I theorize the corporation’s religious personality as produced through both figurative (analogical) and performative (constitutive) operations of legal discourse. This perspective reframes the corporate form as a legally constituted artefact rather than an archetype linking religious and economic collectives. The article advocates for an approach to studying religion and capitalism in the Global South that centers local struggles with corporate power, while remaining attuned to structural inequalities steering them in capital’s favor.