1800–2026 CE
Modern Period (Colonial to Contemporary)
Colonial legal codification took single juristic opinions out of a plural, locally adaptable classical tradition and fixed them as binding state statute — documented in detail for British India's "Anglo-Muhammadan law" and French codification in North Africa (Hallaq, 2009). The consequences of that codification, and of the divergent post-colonial and national trajectories that followed it, remain visible in the sharply different outcomes across contemporary Muslim-majority and diaspora societies operating under the same underlying textual and juristic inheritance.
Content from this period
- Research Paper
Islam or Muslim Culture? Measuring the Distance Between Revelation and Practice
How do you tell Islam itself apart from the cultures that grew up around it? This essay tests inheritance law, national governance, elder care, and charitable giving against the Qur'an's own text, and asks a harder question too: can a country call itself Islamic on population alone, or should it also be judged by how well it reflects the Qur'an's own ethical demands?
- Research Paper
Women in Mainstream Islam: Protection, Restriction, and the Historical Development of Religious Practice
A historical-critical review testing whether practices commonly described as Islamic requirements for women — segregation, face-veiling, travel guardianship, exclusion from mosques and public office — rest on the Qur'an itself or on later hadith, jurisprudence, dynastic custom, and regional practice.