Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue: Reevaluating the Norms of Law and Governance in Islamic Legal History

This special issue explores the interplay of the norms of governance and Islamic law in Muslim societies, historically, from the eighteenth to late twentieth centuries, right at the moment when Western colonial powers arose to assert hegemony over the Muslim world. These four essays engage scholarly debates about continuities as well as discontinuities between historical and modern Islamic political–legal paradigms for state laws in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. Within this debate lies the opportunity to reexamine the modern legacies of early Islamic norms for law and governance as they intersected and diverged in novel ways.