The niggling but intuitive question on the implementation of Islamic law that triggered a lively debate among the graduate students at the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge was three pronged: the first part of the question pertained to the complete prohibition of entertainment, second to the curtailed role of women and third to the severity in the penal code.

It was discussed that why whenever any Islamic dispensation is founded -- be it Taliban in Afghanistan or ISIS in Iraq and Syria -- the severest kind of clampdown takes effect on entertainment and its means. Saudi Arabia and Iran are marginally less inflexible. In all these polities, such means of entertainment as cinema, theatre, music or sports are deemed to be un-Islamic and are, therefore, proscribed.

Then, womenfolk get a raw deal at the hands of Islamists. They are prohibited from seeking education and employment. Their movement in public sphere is declared a violation of the ‘Islamic code’. As a result, they are effectively imprisoned at home. One interesting observation made during the discussion was that the moral position that the Muslim clergy usually takes, particularly with respect to women, is the same as the evangelists of the late 19th century, as if it is frozen in time.

Further, the discussion turned to severity of the penal code. Capital punishment, and treating such punishment as a public spectacle, is reminiscent of the medieval past, no matter what region or territory. The accused is presumed guilty without due process of law and is hurriedly executed. That, at best, can be called vigilantism -- to breed a new type of human being.

The niggling side of these questions was the ambiguity about the historical context of such radical actions. History does not vouch for the consistency of any such practices. In the history of Muslims, despite vociferous pleadings from the Ulema, local cultural practices found their way into mainstream socio-cultural spheres, whether the rulers were Mughals, Ottomans, Safavids or even their preceding dynasties.

Thus, the blurred past of these practices makes it extremely daunting for the apologists for the Islamic penal code to trace their ideological genealogy, which is critically important for their validation.

Obviously the validation of any act performed in the present comes from the past.

One may, therefore, argue that the code promulgated in the areas under ‘Islamic’ rule is extra-historical. The real problem is the connection between the moment such law is practised and its precedent. What is starkly missing is an unbroken historical chain linking the two. If any accused or criminal is penalised in the present, if the precedent validating the punishment exists in a moment 1400 years ago, we are presented with a veritable tangle.

One opinion that was expressed nudged the argument away from the historical genealogy of the penal code and brought in the interpretation of the foundational religious text as the basis of ascertaining the validity of any measure taken. What came to be accepted unanimously was the prism of positivism from which the text is read and interpreted. Since the Ulema in the modern age have embraced modern tools, positivism is deeply rooted in their projection of the Islamic faith. The universalism for which the Ulema and their fellow Islamic zealots have a penchant is derived from this positivism.

But positivism is a product of the age of enlightenment, a relatively modern construct.

In the post-enlightenment period (17th and 18th centuries), those enthused by the great leaps being taken in science were led to believe that as human societies inevitably came to be based on science, they were bound to become more alike. They thought that scientific knowledge would engender a universal morality in which the aim of the society was as much production as possible. The belief that only the growth of scientific knowledge could bring about a complete emancipation of mankind became pervasive by the 19th century, and its resonances reached the subcontinent.

This enlightenment faith - for it soon acquired the trappings of a religion - was most clearly expressed by Sayyid Qutb, Rashid Rida, Hassan al Bannah and Maulana Maududi. They imbibed positivist thoughts and their exegesis has an explicit ring of positivist (maaqolat) thinking.

Similarly, the over-arching category of umma also stemmed from ‘universalism’, which, as has already been argued, was derived from this same positivism.

The umma was conjured into existence at the behest of the Ottoman Sultan in 1860s, when Turkey had been reduced from a great power to little more than the sick man of Europe.

With the once great Muslim empires now bereft of political power -- Mughal rule had ended ignominiously after the suppression of the 1857 uprising, and the Ottomans were rendered merely a shadow of their past glory -- the Muslim political elite sought refuge in Muslim universalism articulated through the category of umma.

It was also at this time that all manner of pristine and primordial categories staged a comeback, probably because many people believed that by bringing back the harsh practices of an imagined glorious past, the process of decline might halt. But what was expected failed to materialise. While at the very prime of their political power, they remained divided into dynasties and empires, and while, during a period of decline, they were pushed ideologically towards universalistic categories, these never had any realistic likelihood of materialising.

The author is the Iqbal Fellow at the

University of Cambridge as professor in the Centre of South Asian Studies