Customizing Islamic Law
Matrilineal Muslims of the Indian Ocean
9789048559596
386 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
Millions of Muslims across the Indian Ocean littoral have historically followed a matrilineal system, where women had better economic and social stability and an upper hand in their personal choices. The system raised serious questions as the Islamic legal tradition evolved in the Middle East, especially when some inheritance customs gave men little to no share in the property. Bringing diverse matrilineal Muslim communities together for the first time, this volume studies their engagements against the patriarchal interpretations of Sharia in comparative and connected perspectives. The comparisons and connections go beyond the Indian Ocean and Islamic world, to the Mediterranean, Sub-Saharan and North African contexts as well as to the Christian, Jewish and Hindu traditions. The contributors explore how and why the followers of the matrilineal praxis defended the system within the legal epistemologies of their religion.
Author Bio
Mahmood Kooria is Lecturer in the History of the Indian Ocean World at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh (Scotland). Earlier he held teaching and research positions at Leiden University (the Netherlands), University of Bergen (Norway), Ashoka University (India), National Islamic University Jakarta (Indonesia), International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and African Studies Centre (ASC), Leiden (the Netherlands), Dutch Institute in Rabat (Morocco). He read his PhD in Global History at the Leiden University Institute for History in 2016, authored Islamic Law in Circulation: Sh.fi.. Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and co-edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean: Texts, Ideas and Practices (Routledge, 2022).
