Sharia Workshop with Michael O’Sullivan

“Corporate Islam: Sharia and Capitalism among the Gujarati Muslim Commercial Castes, c. 1850-1940 ?”

Michael O'Sullivan is a Junior Research Fellow at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard. He obtained his PhD from UCLA in 2019, and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School's Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization.

Dr. O’Sullivan’s paper provides insight into the largely unstudied legal history of the three most prominent Gujarati Muslim commercial castes. The assumption that a hallmark of their history has been their legal exceptionalism - the notion that they stood apart from other Indian Muslims by virtue of their place in the colonial legal system or their apathy towards sharia – is rejected. Unaware of this longer genealogy, historians have rooted both the ersatz Muslim identity of the Gujarati Muslim commercial castes and their economic prowess in this supposed legal exceptionalism.

But lumping these three communities together into a common pot is not only misleading, but belied by the facts. Each of these castes - and even individual sub-castes - bore distinct legal histories that demand careful reconstruction. Their engagement with sharia norms were neither instrumental, nor imitative, but constantly modulated by the shifting yardsticks of law and custom as variably determined by the caste corporation, the colonial civic order, Muslim institutions, and new jurisprudential inputs.