Islamic Law, Oil Wealth, and the Modern State in the Gulf: The Scope of the Sharia in Twentieth-Century Qatar

Abstract How can one write the modern legal history of the Gulf states without projecting onto the past the contemporary hegemony of the modern nation-state? What narratives other than secularization stories might be told? And what archives are available to us to facilitate such an endeavor? This paper addresses these questions with reference to Qatar, where a powerful sharia judiciary developed under the British Protectorate maintained its autonomy until the 1990s. The publications of the Presidency of Sharia Courts (est. 1958) and the work of its long-time president, Shaykh ʿAbdallāh b. Zayd Āl Maḥmūd (1911–97), suggest that oil wealth, modern state bureaucracy, and the British legal order expanded – rather than curtailed – the scope of sharia law in Qatar in the course of the twentieth century. Sharia scholars and institutions reinforced the rule of law, contributed to minimizing the role of customary norms in society, replaced commercial courts and alternative modes of dispute resolution, and helped establish an autonomous legal sphere separate from political power.