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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Towards an historiography of Islamic law in Africa
| Panel |
56. Moving Frontiers: contestations in Muslim communities in Africa
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| Paper ID | 720 |
| Author(s) |
Jeppie, shamil
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | This paper is a preliminary exploration of the ways in which the study of Islamic law in Africa has developed. It investigates how the boundaries of "Islamic law" in Africa were established and distinguished from other fields of writing on Islam and Muslim communities on the continent. It looks at the movement of writings between the period of the colonial administrators and missionary scholars through to the legal scholars of the late and post-colonial periods. There is also a movement from the more strictly legal works to a more recent anthropological approach. But while there has been some work in an ethnographic fashion the calls for "full shariah" in parts of the continent has also meant a turn to investigating Islamic criminal law and more generally the way in which discourses on Islamic law are implicated in political discourses and struggles. The growth of the study of "Islamic law" will also be examined in the light of the broader development of the study of law, custom and colonialism in Africa. |
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