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Aḥmad Jīvan (d. 1130/1718) was a staunch Ḥanafī jurist in the times of Awrangzīb, who was known for his excellent faculty of memorisation. Because of his major contributions to the field of uṣūl al-fiqh (principles of jurisprudence), he made it to the royal court. In his voluminous exegesis, Tafsīrāt Aḥmadiyya, he wrote about those verses from which could be derived juristic commands, basic principles, and scholastic problems. Aḥmad’s basic rule was that everything is permissible unless it is explicitly forbidden in the Qurʾān. Aḥmad Jīvan was born in 1047/1638 in the small ma…

Early Muslim social differentiations in South Asia developed into caste categories and, by early modern times, even reflected structural analogies to the highly stratified Hindu varṇa system with regard to legal punishments that favoured the gentry (ashrāf, pl. shurafāʾ), as laid out in the Fatāwā-yi ʿĀlamgīrī. Competition amongst various interest groups in South Asia led, over the course of time, to numerous divisions in the social composition of an arguably egalitarian Islam in a hierarchical Hindu majority social system. 1. The emergence of social differentiation Early Muslim…