Continuity of Sharia: Development of criminal jurisprudence in the nineteenth century

This book traces the development of criminal jurisprudence in the nineteenth century, revealing the lively debate and fruitful interaction between Islamic jurisprudence and modern legislation, through a comparative study of legal codes in India, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. The author in this book re-examines the narrative discourse of "discontinuity of Sharia," which has been prevalent in modern literature, proposing instead the thesis of "continuity of Sharia," where Sharia does not appear as a rigid heritage that the modern state has swept aside, but rather as a flexible foundational system that continued to carry out legislative work and re-produced itself within the structures of the modern state, through the efforts of a group of Muslim actors with varying legal, judicial, jurisprudential, educational, social, and translational roles, in a complex network of interaction and adaptation. Brian Wright: a researcher in the history of Islamic jurisprudence and its legal transformations in the modern era, holds a PhD from McGill University, and works as a research fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt. His work focuses on studying the interaction between Islamic law and positive laws in the context of colonization and modernization, and this book — which was his doctoral thesis — is the culmination of his research project.