Scholars of Ḥayḍ and Nifās? The Endurance of Islamic Law in Late Colonial Sudan.

This paper relocates the study of contemporary Islamic law from state judiciaries and reformist polemics to the learning circles of late colonial Sudan. It focuses on the careers of two Mālikī jurists: ʿUthmān b. Ḥasanayn Barrī al-Jaʿalī (d. 1960) and Abū Ṭāhir Ḥasan Fāy al-Bijāwī (d. 1984). Hardly indifferent to the pressures of modernity, each attempted to resuscitate a Mālikī school beset by colonial reforms from above and revisionist critiques from below. A Sufi, political advisor, and traditionalist, al-Jaʿalī composed an homage to the "slavish imitation" of Mālikī jurists (taqlīd) that nevertheless admitted the intervention and frequent rebuke of its author. al-Bijāwī did the opposite, employing his expertise in ḥadīth to recast demands for dissolving legal schools (madhhab s) in a clever justification of Mālikī doctrine. Together they highlight examples of internal reform, as well as the significance of Africa's jurists, that remain understudied in the contemporary history of Islamic law. Less the dissolution of the madhhab than its resilience, they attest to the ways in which Mālikī scholars continued to defend the classical legal tradition long after its presumed demise at the hands of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]