Jonathan Brown
Georgetown University
How British Translators in India Revolutionized (Accidentally) Islamic Legal History
The labor of British scholars to translate works of Islamic law and history from Arabic and Persian into English was a crucial element of British colonial administration in India, and it made available a wealth of texts to the Anglophone world.
Jonathan Brown's lecture will examine how several errors in the translations of Indian Muslim historical writings led to enduring misunderstandings about crucial aspects of Islamic legal history in India, including the purpose of the Fatawa Alamgiri and the legality of honor killing.
Jonathan Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and he is the Director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He received his BA in History from Georgetown University in 2000 and his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2006. Dr. Brown has studied and conducted research in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, South Africa, India, Indonesia and Iran. His book publications include The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon (2007), Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (2009), Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (2011), and Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (2014), which was named one of the top books on religion for 2014 by The Independent. He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include Islamic legal reform and a translation of Sahih al-Bukhari with commentary.