Mahmood Kooria’s Islamic Law in Circulation examines the
development of postclassical Islamic law pertaining to Shaí’ism in the
eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Using the nodal point of
Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, authored by 13th-century Damascene jurist Yaḥyā
bin Sharaf al-Nawawī, this book circumnavigates the major narratives of
Shāí’ī legal circulation over a millennium. Based on this Mamluk-era text,
Kooria traces the formation of the legal oceanic community by elucidating
its enormous intertextual and intellectual networks and ramiícations. e
main argument of Kooria’s book is that historical Shāí’īsm in the postclassical
Islamic communities took place not by center-periphery coercion or state
conquest, but through cross-cultural negotiations between scholars and
itinerant traders in maritime milieux throughout Africa, Arabia, and Asia.