This dissertation examines the history of Islamic legal pluralism and hadith scholarship in the Indian Ocean from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. In conceptual terms, it integrates the debates within sociolegal studies on legal pluralism (or the multiplicity of legal orders within a social field) with the intellectual history of the Islamic schools of law (madhhab). In so doing, it systematically reconstructs for the first time a history of madhhab-centered legal pluralism that connected Sunni scholars from different schools of law in the Mughal, Ottoman, and British empires, as well as other Indian Ocean polities. Within this context, it uncovers the historical processes by which Indian members of the Hanafi madhhab from Sindh and Delhi maneuvered across school lines and shifting imperial geographies to pursue hadith scholarship and construct legal authority in the Indian Ocean.

By analyzing a wide array of sources, including fatwas, legal treatises, hadith commentaries, hagiographies, travelogues, and imperial records in Arabic, Urdu, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, this dissertation breaks from state-centered histories of Islamic law and one-sided models of transregional intellectual diffusion. Instead, it argues that Indian Islamic law was transformed through sustained intellectual exchange with multiple legal schools and scholarly networks in the Indian Ocean. These exchanges catapulted the hadith sciences to the center of Indian Hanafi juristic discourse, fueling immense debate in the eighteenth century on the authority of the Hanafi school in particular and the madhhabs altogether, as mediated by the imperatives of taqlīd (legal conformity), taḥqīq (verification), and ijtihād (independent reasoning). As this hadith-based legal discourse expanded beyond scholarly circles across emerging publics of manuscript and print in the early nineteenth century, it fragmented the authority of the madhhabs to serve as the basis of Sunni legal pluralism in the Indian Ocean, leading to the formation of new Islamic legal institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Spanning the period from 1850 to 1950, this dissertation is a study of three processes: 1) the religious and commercial institutions created by Indian Muslims to participate in circuits of regional and global capitalism; 2) intra-Muslim debates concerning Islamic law, customary practice, and the norms and institutions of modern capitalism; 3) the rise of an anti-capitalist discourse of ‘Islamic economics’ which provided the framework for the postcolonial birth of the Islamic finance industry. By situating Indian Muslim economic life in a geographic frame stretching from the Balkans to Burma, and using sources in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu, this dissertation represents a significant empirical intervention. At the same time, rather than resorting to the normative, ahistorical categories of Islam typical in studies of ‘Islam and capitalism,’ this dissertation utilizes the dual frameworks of political and religious economy to zoom in on the panoply of Muslim commercial and religious ‘firms’ that operated in this space. The study of these firms highlights the very real tensions - between law and custom, colonial capital and local enterprise, religious competition and appeals to Muslim unity - that modulated Indian Muslim commercial life.

Four arguments are deduced from the study of these firms. Firstly, there was substantial intra-Muslim economic disparities throughout the colonial period, which call into question the typical argument of a ‘Hindu-Muslim wealth gap,’ a formulation that ignores the economic links between Muslim and non-Muslims. Secondly, the success of select Indian Muslim firms was contingent upon the initial mobilization of local religious institutions needed to enter the market as a competitive player, followed by the creation of lasting relationships of trust with non-Muslims. Thirdly, there was immense internal disagreement among firms over whether the Islamic legal tradition must supply a benchmark for commerce, which spawned competing behavioral norms and institutional trajectories. Lastly, the rise of an all-India Muslim politics showcased the dissonance between different forms of Muslim capitalism. This precipitated a highly charged struggle over what an ‘authentic’ Muslim economic life entailed. Ultimately, these rival visions and the firms that espoused them were central to the so-called ‘Great Convergence,’ the process whereby the economic disparities perpetuated by nineteenth-century colonialism and globalization were negotiated and mitigated.

In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire was marked by constant polemical disputes over Islamic religious practices. By the end of the century, these debates, which covered topics as varied as the permissibility of smoking tobacco or saint worship, had become so heated the many Muslims in the empire were willing to declare their co-religionists heretics. I use these polemical disputes as a setting in which to explore theories and approaches of religious transformation in the Islamic world. Rather than emphasize religious change driven by socio-economic forces or the disciplinary mechanisms of the state, I focus instead on how Islamic religiosity changed as it became increasingly entangled in the material world of the Eastern Mediterranean. I argue that intensified regimes of circulation of objects and people, especially between the Arabic and Turkish-speaking (Rumi) segments of the empire, were generative of key developments of Ottoman religiosity such as novel forms of reading and writing, a culture of pilgrimage centered on the hajj, and, indeed, the bitter polemicism itself. I do this through four detailed case studies of heresy, manuscript “pamphlets,” pilgrimage, and travelogues. The dissertation thus makes two contributions. The first is to integrate discussions of materiality and circulation into our understanding of the transformation of Islamic religiosity in the early modern Ottoman Empire. This is reflected not only in my analysis but also in my research method, in which the materiality of the manuscripts themselves helps me uncover unknown writers and topics and connect a myriad of unrelated works. The second contribution is to highlight how the sustained encounter, exchange, and connectivity between Rumis and Arabs became an important motor of religious and cultural change in the empire.

This dissertation focuses upon peripatetic, godly and technologically advanced Muslim miracle-workers or pawangs who operated upon and were pivotal to rice, mining, game and armed frontiers in 19th and early 20th century Malaya. It is written with an understanding that a study of miracle-workers is fruitful in terms of providing a microcosm of the characteristics of particular socioeconomic stratums and socioeconomic trends. Redressing the conspicuous academic silence on these key historical agents, this dissertation explores how a variety of socioeconomic activities in 19th and early 20th century Malaya were premised and dependent upon the miraculous expertise of pawangs; namely agricultural colonization, forest clearing, rice production, alluvial tin and gold mining, elephant trapping and the bearing of hand-held firearms. Moreover, this dissertation elaborates upon how such a historical analysis of miracles or miraculous expertise is revelatory of sophisticated cosmopolitan worlds wherein miracle-workers capitalized upon their predominance within subaltern communities as spectacular intercessors of eclectic supernatural beings, and the patronage networks of indigenous and non-indigenous entrepreneurs engaged in extracting the natural resources of the Peninsula.

Drawing upon the writings of service professionals, including soldiers, scribes, legal officials and petty bureaucrats, Writing the Inter-Imperial World in Afghan North India (ca. 1774 – 1857) is a study of perspectives on political and social change during the transition to colonialism. From 1774, as the East India Company conquered the semi-autonomous Rohilla state and introduced new administrative measures, service professionals—who were key mediators of changes in governance—were faced with a choice: should they implement, actively resist or escape this development? Departing from historiography that has seen such figures through the eyes of the Company archive, this dissertation seeks to investigate how they documented their encounter with incipient modes of colonial rule. In a range of original works, comprising Persian and Urdu memoirs, biographies, chronicles and poetry, they elaborated their circumstances within and beyond the former Afghan principalities, reflecting on the regional frontiers that were constantly shifting in their lifetimes as an older skein of imperial provinces was being eroded. My dissertation argues that through their writings these figures generated a political discourse centered on distinctive conceptions of regional and imperial politics, history, service, and customary law. This discourse continued to echo in the provinces through the nineteenth century, even as the history of these actors was obscured by the rise of colonial and nationalist modernity.

This dissertation examines how four prominent Muslim Indian religious scholars (ʿulamā’) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wrote histories to construct authority and create communities. The four scholars are Shiblī Nuʿmānī (1857-1914), ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī (1869-1923), Sulaymān Nadwī (1884-1953), and Abū Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī (1913-1999). All four shared institutional connections to Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ, a madrasa in north India, and Dār al-Muṣannifīn, a research and publishing house. Because of the centrality of historical writing in their scholarly career, the four scholars are referred to in the dissertation as ʿulamā’-historians.This dissertation tracks the rise of ʿulamā’-historians as a new specialist of religious scholars since the late nineteenth century. The religious authority of ʿulamā’-historians studied in this dissertation was largely built on their historical writings. History was their main scholarly endeavor, and it formed the bulk of their intellectual oeuvre. In accounting for the emergence of ʿulamā’-historians from the nineteenth century, the dissertation argues that they gained recognition as religious authorities by putting their scholarly learning to use in recovering Muslim pasts to address concerns of Muslims in the present. Recovering pasts entailed discovering new sources and/or approaches to write about moments from Muslim history that had been previously marginalized or forgotten. The ʿulamā’-historians, through their act of recovery, became mediators between the past and the present as they utilized history to give meaning to what it meant to be Muslim in colonial and post-colonial societies. By putting themselves in dialogue with the scholarly traditions of the ʿulamā’, even when they were critical of aspects of it, they enhanced the prestige of history as a scholarly endeavor for ʿulamā’.

My dissertation analyzes the effects of World War I on the port city of Alexandria, Egypt through the investigation and trial of a serial murder case that took place in 1920 - 21. The victims of the serial murders were seventeen women who had engaged in clandestine sex work in Alexandria during the war, and their death marked the rise of domestic trafficking networks in interwar Egypt. Two of the female accomplices to the murders, Raya and Sakina, became scapegoats for the crime and were the first women in Egyptian history to receive the death penalty. Numerous Egyptian films, TV shows and comedies have been produced about these murders in recent decades, and the case is still widely known throughout the Middle East today as "Raya and Sakina." Despite the many afterlives of this case, no historian has studied the two thousand pages of handwritten legal records that were produced about these murders. My dissertation utilizes the records of the Egyptian National Archives and Library, the microfilm collection of the National Judicial Studies Center in Egypt, and the digitized materials of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to analyze the case in its broader historical context. I argue that the murder of the clandestine sex workers and the execution of Raya and Sakina marked the formation of new relationships of power between workers, the state, and an expanding middle class, and new discursive relationships between gender, sexuality, class and criminality. This study examines how these relationships were institutionalized legally, materially, spatially, and discursively, leading to the spread of middle-class modernity in Egypt and the beginning of the end of cosmopolitan Alexandria.

My doctoral dissertation, “Knowledge-Migrants between South Asia and Europe: The Production of Technical and Scientific Ideas among Students and Scientists, 1919-1945,” analyzes the role of Afghan students and German scientists in producing and exchanging ideas about fine arts, medicine, political ideologies, and science. The main goal of my dissertation is to address, using case studies, what the role of travel and circulation was in producing ideas among Afghans in Germany and Germans in Afghanistan, how ideas emerged, which institutions and practices were involved in producing these ideas, and how these ideas circulated and impacted the social and intellectual fabric of Europe and South Asia. My dissertation argues that the resultant knowledge among these actors was neither fixed nor systematic, but rather a practical activity that was located in the routines of everyday life. These everyday practices are, in turn, important to examine because they uncover overlapping and shared intellectual, material, and political networks that circulated ideas further afield than just within the respective national bounds of Afghanistan, India, or Germany.