> With all due respect, could you make an intervention, even a corrective one, without adopting a condescending tone? It's offensive for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the knowledge/power assumptions that actuate such a tone. Couldn't you have made your points without those condescending (rhetorical) questions? Even clueless, prejudiced, and sharia-phobic Westerners know that there is more to sharia than the prescribed punishments. I don't enjoy being talked down to.
I apologize if I sounded condescending. I did not send a first draft, and in fact edited it so as not to sound confrontational, which might have caused a worse reaction. Finding the right tone for a correction is always a problem, and I myself am often a victim of both condescension and confrontation. In fact I could read your above paragraph as condescending if I wanted to, but I'm sure that wasn't your intention, so I won't. As for clueless, prejudiced and sharia-phobic Westerners, there are some, perhaps many, who do think there is no more to sharia than certain punishments. You're lucky if you haven't met them.
>
> On the substance of your post, perhaps the question of why the late formal restriction of sharia to civil law, especially family law, occurred is more germane. Of course, Sharia guided the decisions of the alkali courts in the emirates, but it was not only sharia. It was a mishmash of sharia and common law principles. But, as you yourself said, this colonial sharia regime could not impose any punishments considered offensive to British morality, which means MOST prescribed punishments for CRIMINAL offenses. It seems to m then that, whatever the official policy was, if the Alkali courts could not rule on criminal law because their punishments were likely to offend "British morality" and to be overturned sharia became effectively restricted to the civil and family realm. You seem exclusively focused on formal changes in British policy. I am focused on that too, and my own information is that the change actually began sooner, albeit in specific areas and on a case-by-case basis. But I am also concerned with what actually happened on the ground. Steven Pierce has a good article on this, and there are others.
I'd love to see those articles if you have references. Searching Google scholar I find a reference to a book of his about land tenure in Kano, but of course land tenure was an area where 'urf dominated.
You seem to preclude the possibility of Sharia evolving, though, if you do not consider something to be Sharia law unless 6th century punishments are fully implemented. Even Abdullahi Danfodiyo thought that sharia evolved over time, and I've read that the Moroccan government is involved in a major rethinking of Islamic law in an attempt to modernize it. I'm not a Wahhabi, or even a Muslim, so I wouldn't tell either of those that they're not Muslim.
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