Translation was often an extended arm of writing commentaries in the Indian Ocean littoral. In the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, translating Shāfiʿī texts gave many jurists the best ways to vernacularise Islam and its laws, while for many others it provided a tool to understand the laws of the people their states had subjugated. There were similarities as much as differences among these two streams. Processes of cultural translations united the two, while vernacularisation and colonisation divided them. This chapter identifies four stages of translations that advanced the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée: two Afrasian and two European. It demonstrates their nuances in and around the Indian Ocean in an integrated perspective in which Asian, African and European fuqahā estates appear as interpreters, translators and colonisers to meet their specific needs and necessities of their audience, state, language and law. This chapter takes all the major texts we have discussed in the book to analyse the contemporaneous processes of translations in Afro-Eurasian terrains.

This chapter traces a case involving a Muslim wife, Badal, who left behind a marriage contracted for her in her childhood on attaining puberty. Ameer Ali’s judgment in the case of Badal Aurat and Anr. v. Emperor (1891) was cited repeatedly as a precedent for the application of the Islamic legal concept of the “option of puberty” in colonial courtrooms. The case sheds interesting light on layered and dynamic historical structure of “Islamic law” and serves as a counterpoint to the tragic and coeval case of Phulmoni Das studied in the first chapter of the book. This chapter traces the afterlives of the case in colonial courtrooms, not with the intent to celebrate Muslim law in its colonial application, but in order: first, to use an Islamic legal principle – the “option of puberty” – to shine a light on the kinks, quirks, and limitations of the liberal legal principle of the “age of consent”; second, to raise questions about the contrasting visibility of the two cases – Badal and Phulmoni – in the historical scholarship on the age of consent and marriage in India; and third, to ask if it is possible to step away from liberal legal categories to imagine consent without (chronological) age.