Jeff Redding (St. Louis/Bonn): The Rule and the Role of Islamic Law: Constituting secular law and governance in India

Abstract

“Islamic law’s relationship to secular governance has become a particularly fraught one in the contemporary period.  Whether from the perspective of Islamic law’s advocates, secularism’s partisans, or publics caught in the two’s crossfire, few people see the relationship between Islam and secularism as anything but discordant.  

In this talk (based on my current manuscript project), I aim to dismantle the (false) opposition between secularism and Islamic law in an atypical way.  This talk does so by identifying the ways in which Islamic legal actors themselves make secular governance possible in one significant context, namely India.  Islamic legal actors enable secular governance in India in both ideological and material ways.  Ideologically, Islamic legal actors enable secular governance by providing a necessary instantiation of secularism’s alleged capacity to tolerate ‘difference.’  Materially, they do so by providing necessary dispute-resolution infrastructure for a secular state which courts were neither designed for, nor capable of, the monopolization of dispute-resolution and legal pronouncement.

The Islamic legal actors who help constitute the Indian state’s system of secular law and governance, and whom my manuscript discusses and analyzes with particularity, are individuals involved with an Indian non-state system of Muslim dispute resolution known as the dar ul qaza system.  Dar ul qaza means ‘place of adjudication’ (in both Urdu and Arabic), and the Indian dar ul qazas examined in my manuscript project provide but one example of what many people commonly refer to as ‘Muslim courts’ or ‘shariat courts.’”

Jeff A. Redding

Fellow, Käte Hamburger Kolleg „Recht als Kultur“

Associate Professor, Saint Louis University School of Law

Curriculum Vitae

Jeff A. Redding studierte Wirtschaftswissenschaften und Soziologie an der Harvard University (B.A., magna cum laude) und promovierte mit Auszeichnung an der University of Chicago Law School. Von 2000 bis 2002 arbeitete er in Südasien, zunächst als Visiting Research Associate am Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, Pakistan, später als Mitglied der Adjunct Faculty der Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan, und anschließend als Research Attorney des Lawyers Collective in Neu-Delhi, Indien. Nach seiner Rückkehr in die Vereinigten Staaten war Jeff A. Redding als Visiting Researcher am Islamic Legal Studies Program der Harvard Law School, als Fellow am Center for the Study of Law and Culture an der Columbia Law School und als Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellow in Law an der Yale Law School tätig. Außerdem war er Assistant Professor of Political Science and Law an der American University in Kairo und juristischer Berater im Mumbaier Büro des Lawyers Collective. Seit 2008 war Jeff A. Redding Assistant Professor an der Saint Louis University School of Law, wo er 2013 zum Associate Professor berufen wurde und Zivilprozessrecht und Rechtsvergleichung unterrichtet sowie ein Seminar zum Thema Rechtspluralismus anbietet. Zugleich forschte Professor Redding von Dezember 2010 bis Juni 2011 am Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris und war von Mai bis Juni 2012 Visiting Professor an der Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Seit Januar 2014 ist Jeff A. Redding Fellow am Käte Hamburger Kolleg „Recht als Kultur“.