Jurisdiction Unbound: Islamic Law and the Making of the Indian Ocean World

Jurisdictions move. They attach to people, travel with documents, and survive the destruction of the physical things they once described. This talk traces that mobility across three sites: the Hadhrami Arab diaspora in the nineteenth-century Straits Settlements, the colonial foreshore in the British Empire, and the petroleum industry of the Netherlands East Indies on the eve of the Second World War. In each case, Islamic law, colonial land policy, and corporate legal strategy converged on the same fundamental insight -- that a claim is most powerful when it can outlast the thing it claims. Hadhrami merchants from the Hadhramawt valley of southern Arabia used powers of attorney and waqf endowments to articulate jurisdiction across colonial courts, inadvertently extending the very frameworks they sought to navigate. When British courts subjected those endowments to English trust law, and colonial engineers converted tidal foreshores into Crown territory, what they enacted was jurisdictional enclosure -- the reduction of legally plural space to a single authoritative framework that erased what it could not accommodate. Dutch petroleum companies took this logic furthest of all, destroying their own refineries in 1942 while systematically preserving the paper record that would form the basis of postwar compensation claims against the Japanese occupation and, later, leverage over a newly sovereign Indonesian state. Across all three cases, jurisdiction emerges not as a fixed attribute of territory but as a practiced, portable, and often deliberately mobile form of power whose colonial forms persist well into the present.

About the Speaker

Nurfadzilah Yahaya traces how colonial institutional frameworks built enduring juridical, territorial, and extractive architectures that decisively transformed societies and still influence contemporary relations between communities, resource access, and state power.

About the Discussant

I am dedicated to bridging divides between area studies by employing perspectives and methods in transnational history, and history and anthropology. My research is driven by broad thematic interests in mobility, religious networks, and politics, and their intersections across time. My book project delves into the pilgrimage and diaspora networks of Chinese Muslims (or the “Hui” people) over the twentieth century, questioning the significance of Mecca as a symbolic and real place in mediating two-way trans-regional imaginaries, travels, exiles, and settlements. The book draws on multi-sited archival and fieldwork conducted in different parts of Saudi Arabia, mainland China (primarily Gansu, Qinghai, and Shanghai), and Taiwan. My other ongoing research projects include labor migrations between South Korea and Saudi Arabia during the late Cold War, and the expansion and politicization of the Korean Muslim community during this period.