In Jeff Redding’s new book, A Secular Need: Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India (University of Washington Press, Global South Asia series, 2020), the complex operations of a network of non-state Muslim courts and their diverse interactions with the state are explored. Typically, legal theorists center the state in their analysis, but A Secular Need argues that we need to focus more concertedly on non-state law, especially if we are to understand how power in the legal arena ultimately works. Moreover, without understanding the secular state’s dependencies on Islamic non-state legal actors in India, we will never fully appreciate why and how the Indian state remains so resolutely anti-Muslim. The state’s anti-Muslim politics have continued in the COVID-19 era, suggesting once again that there is stickiness to this politics whose underlying dynamics we ignore at our own peril.
Panel members
Jeff Reddingis a Senior Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School and a New Generation Network scholar …
