"A fine book.Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers."-- CHOICE "How was homicide handled in India, Turkey, and Egypt, seven or eight generations ago? Brian Wright's answer is a bravura performance. An advanced academic, an educated non-specialist, and a fledgling student of Islamic legal history can be assured of the wince and the thrill as they digest this feast of arguments, cases, and carefully scrutinized material."-- Ahmad Atif Ahmad, University of California, Santa Barbara "Is the shari'a as understood and applied today an 'inauthentic' replica of Western law or an 'authentic' response to modernity's challenges by Muslim jurists drawing on their own tradition? This is one of the most pressing and engaging questions in the Muslim world. Drawing on a remarkable range of languages and source materials, Wright's excellent work shows how Muslim jurists in Egypt, Istanbul, and Delhi interacted with colonial officials or shared ideas of modernity to create modern Islamic law."-- Jonathan AC Brown, Georgetown University "Under the influence of colonial power and the desire to control their populations, Muslim states developed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, new criminal codes, laying the foundations of systems that continue to inform the application of criminal justice to this day.

Unlike many who have seen these codes as a pivotal shift and divergence from the sharia, Brian Wright challenges this view, comparing between the Egyptian, Ottoman, and Indian contexts, to argue for a kind of continuity between past prevailing paradigms of the shari'a and these modern codes." --Mohamed Serag, The American University in Cairo.