Toward an Interruptive History of Islamic Law

This paper critically assesses the potentials and the limits of the two major streams of historiography of Islamic law - the 'scripturalist' and the 'new historian' stream - in order to account for many significant yet often overlooked factors that have shaped the course and contents of Islamic legal tradition, including those of (cyclical) globalisation(s), vernacular knowledge systems, cultural revolutions, crude periodisations and modernist re-configurations. The paper looks into historical narratives of Islamic law from various temporal and cultural contexts, in an attempt to challenge the mainstream, non-vernacular periodisations and generalisations of certain long-lasting historical phenomena