The 1959 Iraqi Personal Status Code was controversial at enactment, and it remains so to this day. Some of the controversy relates to its progressive elements, which include a ban on child marriage, expanded child custody rights granted to mothers, and limitations on polygamy. Another significant dimension to the controversy, less remarked upon in scholarly and media circles, concerns the extent to which the Iraqi state should have the power to legislate at all with respect to personal status matters, and instead to defer to traditional religious authorities for rulemaking. This chapter highlights some of the key rules of the Personal Status Code, its evolution over time, its treatment in the courts, and the controversies that continue to surround it. The chapter shows that in many ways, the challenges facing the Personal Status Code reflect the cleavages that have posed an existential threat to Iraq since its creation.

Chapter 3 deals with Islamic supremacy clauses, source of law clauses, and repugnancy clauses, which are present in almost half of all Muslim countries’ constitutions. Islamic supremacy clauses subjugate all lawmaking to Islam, shari‘a, or Islamic precepts. This chapter traces the origins and incidence of these clauses – by finding their birth in British colonial law – and traces their relationship to demography, geography, colonial history, and human rights provisions.

This chapter explores the late Mughal context for colonial-state-formation, focusing on Persianate practices of claimsmaking and dispute resolution in nawabi Bengal. It examines Persian accounts of Mughal and nawabi governance circulating in the orbit of the East India Company government in late eighteenth century Bengal, as well as British views of Mughal institutions, highlighting the role of late Mughal tax officials administering justice to petitioning subjects in disputes about land and taxation. It shows how the central revenue office of the Bengal nawabs, the khalisa sharifa, became a key site for the Company's colonization and transformation of Mughal, Persianate practices of legal ordering.

The president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, has called the rule of law the glue that binds state and society together. But this glue erodes easily. As the previous chapters have shown, practices and institutions associated with the rule of law are as broken, inconsistent, and discordant as the Horn of Africa’s many Islamic states and their colonial, authoritarian, and democratic architects have been. Throughout the Horn of Africa’s history, political elites – colonial administrators, democratically elected officials, authoritarian rulers, aqils, sultans, sheikhs, international lawyers, and foreign aid workers – have sought to resolve people’s disputes, write constitutions, draft laws, construct law schools, build prisons, and reform courts.

For centuries men have dominated Somali families, states, and the law, serving as the aqils, the sultans, and the leaders of the colonial and state governments, militant groups, clans, elders’ councils, and religious orders described in the previous chapters. Taking up and using the same religious and legal tools as those men, women activists struggling for rights have sowed a different understanding of shari‘a that they hope, inshallah, Somalis will follow. Certainly some women have been involved in co-opting law and religion to reinforce patriarchy or militancy – as informants, foot soldiers, or security agents.

In postcolonial Muslim-majority contexts, particularly in areas struggling with political violence, achieving the ideal of the rule of law is straightforward neither in theory nor in practice. Plural and overlapping legal orders – derived from Islamic principles, from the traditions of indigenous communities, and from the laws and institutions imported by colonial administrators or foreign aid workers and managed by postcolonial state leaders – shape how citizens come to understand different values associated with legal order. In these states, common ideals and shared visions of what law is and how it should work are scarce. Litigants may shop around among different legal systems (each one derived from an amalgam of traditions) for a desired outcome of their disputes, as they are pulled in one direction or another by family members, religious and community leaders, and lawyers.

This chapter investigates the endurance of shari‘a in Somaliland. Somaliland declared independence in May 1991, as Somalia was disintegrating, by reasserting the sovereignty it had for five days (June 26–30) in 1960, prior to unifying with the former Italian Somalia. Between 1991 and 2021, the self-declared state of Somaliland made strides to build peace and promote principles associated with the rule of law. Following a series of elders’ summits, Somaliland outlawed Siad Barre’s national security courts, held contested elections, developed a government of limited powers alongside a new currency and economic development programs, and adopted a constitution rooted in Islamic and international human rights principles.

Only in his twenties, Tayyib was already one of Somaliland’s most promising lawyers. I met Tayyib early on a sunny morning, and we sat down on a couple of plastic chairs along the dirt path outside the Hargeisa courthouse. I asked him why he worked in legal aid programs designed to help poor people have free legal representation in court, what cases he was arguing that day, and what events had shaped his career and the broader development of law in Somalia and Somaliland. As we neared the end of our meeting, I invited him to share his professional goals. I wondered if he hoped to enter politics, private practice, or the United Nations system. These paths would provide more stability, renown, and salary than his current position did, and they were often taken by the most prominent professionals. He looked away, toward the dilapidated courthouse and one-story government buildings. Then he turned back to me and said he “would like to stop” being an attorney altogether.