Welcome to Toronto to those of you at our annual ASLH meeting! Our blogger today is Iza Hussin, Lecturer in Asian Politics and Mohamed Noah Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Her new book, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State was published by University of Chicago Press earlier this year. Her profile can be found here.
In his book The Impossible State: Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament published in 2013, Wael Hallaq argues that “(t)he political, legal, and cultural struggles of today’s Muslims stem from a