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The World's Legal Systems Lecture 11
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The World’s Legal Systems – Lecture 11Islamic law
Law and administration
We start by talking about what is the kind of impact that the Mughal justice had on precolonial India
and also how the British took over the existing legislative framework and what they did in terms of
taking over the entire system of what is called the British toleration and also using the existing legal
framework. Now we saw in the last class that they adopted the framework and they adopted the same
structure, which was the Diwani courts and the Faujdari courts. They went one step further which the
Mughals did not do. They tried to consolidate all kinds of laws and practices of the Muslim community
into one kind of law which they could administer and enforce throughout Muslims in India. This was
very unprecedented because you did not have the Mughal emperor do something like this. As we saw
in the previous class, we saw that each community had its own customary practices and that the Sharia
did not really sort of (…) throughout the country. It was only at (…) centres and also in the context of
any kind of crimes that were connected with the emperor, for instance within the vicinity of the
emperor’s kingdom. Did had the effect of the security of the Mughals themselves for them to actually
impose the Sharia. So there was no imposition of the Sharia at such and each community followed its
own customary practices and as the teacher mentioned, some of these practices involved a mixture of
both Hindu and Islamic practices. We need to understand that the Sharia was not really imposed by
the Mughals, but the British made this artificial inquiry into what are the laws of the Muslims and they
tried to consolidate it into the Shariat act.
Development of modern Indian legal system – justice, equity and good conscience
Now we did a little bit of this in the Hindu law class, where we looked at the 1772 regulation of Warren
Hastings and also how for instance the judge would have not just a Qazi, but also a pundit and we also
spoke about how they found it difficult to get any kind of law or any kind of rulings from the pundits
and since this was so difficult, they eventually gave decisions themselves. They came up with
commentaries and with text books as to what they thought was Hindu law. And they finally did away
with the pundits in the same way they also did away with the Qazis, because the same kind of problem
arose. They felt this was not giving them any kind of understanding of what is Islamic law because
there was a very different kind of reasoning. As we saw, is that in the system of administration in
Islamic law you need to have to parties: the Qazi and the Mufti. You could not just take the Qazi in
isolation, because he had to also rely on the Mufti who is going to give you the fatwa. So the Qazi was
mainly someone who was very administrative and he knew something about the law but he was not
exactly a legal specialist as such. So there was a problem with the Qazis as well. What the British did,
is that they tried to translate other kinds of what they thought were very important texts and
important compilations of the fatwa. But they didn’t somehow get anywhere with this. So what they
did, is that they followed the same principle that they did with Hindu law. They started adjudicating
things themselves and they also came up with commentaries and textbooks like the way they did in
Hindu law. It was the same kind of process by which they dispensed with the Qazi. There are a couple
of important points that the teacher would like to stress on. One was the entire kind of conflict that
they saw having these native legal institutions and that it did not agree with their conceptions of
English law. So they were in a major (…) in terms of how do they really recognize the law of these
natures, but the fact is that the law of these natures seem so unjust, it seems to conflict with our ideas
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