Rethinking Authority: Negotiating Jurisprudence Inside and Outside Aurangzeb’s Court

Abstract

The Fatava-e Alamgiri was an Islamic legal compendium commissioned by the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb. Some scholars argue that it represents the consolidation of sharia (Islamic law) and the application of Hanafi law during Aurangzeb’s rule, but few historians have recently made the case that sharia was always in flux. Broadly, this paper seeks to unsettle the assumption that the Mughal court was an unquestioned authority on Islamic law because it sponsored such fatava collections. The paper will critique this idea by moving beyond fatava collections and will focus on the compilers of the Fatava-e Alamgiri such as Shah Abdur Rahim, and the writings of scholars and jurists associated with Aurangzeb’s court, such as Abdul Nabi Jami Lahori. More specifically, this paper will use their texts on fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and maktubaat (letters) to understand how these scholars and other qazis (judges) were negotiating a social milieu around the court and its adjacent spaces. How did they reframe Islamic law for their scholarly debates and for everyday lives of Muslims and non-Muslims, and how did they write about their contemporaries? This paper will also place these questions in relation to other vernacular texts that show how the interpretation of sharia (Islamic law)took place beyond the court. This is because ordinary people and qazis located outside courtly spaces were equally important participants in the translation and interpretation of Islamic law in the Mughal Empire