BOOK: Adeel HUSSAIN, Law and Muslim Political Thought in Late Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 248 pp., ISBN 9780192859778, £65

 

(image courtesy: Oxford University Press)

Book description: 

During the 1930s, much of the world was in severe economic and political crisis. This upheaval ushered in new ways of thinking about social and political systems. In some cases, these new ideas transformed states and empires alike. Particularly in Europe, these transformations are well-chronicled in scholarship. In academic writings on India, however, Muslim political and legal thought has gone relatively unnoticed during this eventful decade. This book fills this gap by mapping the evolution of Muslim political and legal thought from roughly 1927 to 1940. By looking at landmark court cases in tandem with the political and legal ideas of Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding fathers, this book highlights the more concealed ways in which Indian Muslims began to acquire a political outlook with distinctly separatist aspirations. What makes this period worthy of a separate study is that the legal antagonism between religious communities in the 1930s foreshadowed political conflicts that arose in the run-up to independence in 1947. The presented cases and thinkers reflect the possibilities and limitations of Muslim political thought in colonial India.

Table of contents: 

1.:Introduction
2.:In Search of Vulnerabilities Lost
3.:Shahidganj and the Burden of Time
4.:Jinnah: A Thinker of Existential Survival
5.:Iqbal and Combative Constitutionalism
6.:Conclusion

About the author: 

Adeel Hussain is an Assistant Professor of Legal and Political Theory at Leiden University, The Netherlands, and a Senior Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. Before joining Leiden University, Adeel clerked at the Court of Appeals in Frankfurt, worked for an international law firm, and advised the Government of Afghanistan on constitutional and administrative reform. His research focuses on jurisprudence, comparative constitutional law, international law, and the global history of legal and political thought, with an emphasis on South Asia and Europe. This is his first monograph.

More information can be found here.