Iza Hussin (University of Cambridge): Personal law, personal status, ahwal al-shakhsiyya: a history of translations

About the speaker

Iza Hussin is University Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, a member of the World History faculty, and the Mohamed Noah Fellow at Pembroke College Cambridge. Her work occupies the intersection of Islamic legal studies, comparative politics, and post/colonial law and society studies. Current research projects include a manuscript on the travels of law across the Indian Ocean arena, on the securitisation of religion in local and international legal reasoning, and on challenges to liberal governance in Southeast Asia. She is Director of the PhD in Politics and International Studies, a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series Asian Connections, Associate Editor of Modern Asian Studies, Associate Research Fellow at the Joint Centre for History and Economics (Harvard/Cambridge), and serves on the Editorial Board of the SSRC’s Immanent Frame.

About the topic

What’s personal about personal status, and what is the genealogy of terms and concepts that constitute the term? This paper draws on British colonial India, Malaya, and Egypt to explore inter-imperial translation, competition, and conflation, as dynamics in the making of personal status. It further considers translation as a productive analytic for Islamic legal studies, through textual, institutional, and transformative dynamics.