Abstract
Few works in recent years have enriched the study of Islamic law quite like Faiz Ahmed's Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires. The book presents an opportunity to interrogate prevailing historiographical debates about the “codification” of Islamic law (as opposed to its “compilation”), and to account for processes of divergence in Islamic legal culture across Eurasia. This response explores some of the prevailing tensions among Ottoman, Afghan, and Indian experts in early twentieth-century Afghanistan. These stemmed from the dissimilar legal training acquired by the actors and the varying character of Islamic modernism in each geographical context. A focus on diverse intellectual trajectories and competing visions of Islamic law furnishes a useful means for accounting for the aporia endemic to Aman Allah's modernizing project.
