This wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. In Fluid Jurisdictions, Nurfadzilah Yahaya looks at colonial legal infrastructure and discusses how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more important, she follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests. Yahaya explains why Arab minorities in the region helped to fuel the entrenchment of European colonial legalities: their itinerant lives made institutional records necessary. Securely stored in centralized repositories, such records could be presented as evidence in legal disputes. To ensure accountability down the line, Arab merchants valued notarial attestation land deeds, inheritance papers, and marriage certificates by recognized state officials. Colonial subjects continually played one jurisdiction against another, sometimes preferring that colonial legal authorities administer Islamic law-even against fellow Muslims. Fluid Jurisdictions draws on lively material from multiple international archives to demonstrate the interplay between colonial projections of order and their realities, Arab navigation of legally plural systems in Southeast Asia and beyond, and the fraught and deeply human struggles that played out between family, religious, contract, and commercial legal orders.

In Palestine, family law is a controversial topic publicly debated by representatives of the state, Sharia establishment, and civil society. Yet to date no such law exists. This book endeavors to determine why by focusing on the conceptualization of gender and analyzing "law in the making" and the shifts in debates (2012-2018). In 2012, a ruling on khul'-divorce was issued by the Sharia Court and was well received by civil society, but when the debate shifted in 2018 to how to "harmonize" international law with Islamic standards, the process came to a standstill. These developments and the various power relations cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration the terminology used and redefined in these debates.

The discipline of 'principles of Islamic jurisprudence' ("usul al-fiqh") constitutes the theoretical basis of Islamic law ("Shari'ah") and the indisputable foundation on which it is based. One of the most important branches of "usul al-fiqh" is the study of the usage of language. "Language and the Interpretation of Islamic Law" is the first work to appear in the English language dealing with this important aspect of Islamic law. Dr Sukri Husayn Ramic gives us the background to the terminology used by the different schools of Islamic law and then discusses the different applications of language in legal reasoning and the interpretation of Islamic law.

Pre-modern Western sources generally claim that European mercantile communities in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed legal autonomy, and were thus effectively immune to Ottoman justice. At the same time, they report numerous disputes with Ottoman officials over jurisdiction ("avanias"), which seems to contradict this claim, the discrepancy being considered proof of the capriciousness of the Ottoman legal system. Modern studies of Ottoman-European relations in this period have tended uncritically to accept this interpretation, which is challenged in this book.