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{
    "pk": 59971,
    "title": "Mughals, Ottomans, and the Question of \"Codes\" in Islamic Legal History: The Case of the Fatāwā-yi ʿĀlamgīrī (al-Fatāwā al-Hindīyya) from Early Modern Roots to Modern Legacies",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "As Mughal territorial expansion reached its zenith in the mid-seventeenth century, Shah Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir commissioned a grand council of Muslim legal scholars with a weighty purpose: to compile a comprehensive manual for the use of governors and judges across his Indian empire. Titled after its royal patron, the Fatāwā-yi ʿĀlamgīrī (1672) has in the three centuries since generated a robust commentary and gloss literature in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu. Better known as the Fatāwā Hindīyya in Turkey, the Balkans, and Arab world, the text is considered an authoritative restatement of Hanafi doctrine on a range of devotional, legal, and public administrative questions until this day. Yet, relative to renowned Ottoman “codes” also based on Hanafi fiqh like the Mecelle (1869–1876), there appears to be comparatively less scholarly work on how Mughal law and statecraft engaged the Islamic juristic devices of sīyāsa (public policy) and taqnīn (codification), which this article argues took on new meaning with the groundbreaking processes of “proto-codification” launched in the Fatāwā-yi ʿĀlamgīrī. Building on earlier findings by historians and legal scholars of Islamicate India and Central Asia, this article first historicizes the text’s genealogy and genesis within the late-medieval genre of fatwa compilations to early modern Mughal and Ottoman empires. The article then focuses on the probable objectives, the significant features, and ultimately, the lasting legacies of Aurangzeb’s juridical magnum opus.",
    "language": "en",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": "null"
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "Articles",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2d09c1hb",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Faiz",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Ahmed",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2025-06-04T23:28:01Z",
    "date_accepted": "2025-06-04T23:28:01Z",
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T00:00:00Z",
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            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/uclalaw_jinel/article/59971/galley/45914/download/"
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}