Fluidity of Sharīʿa and the Modern State: Inheritance Rights of Childless Widows under Shīʿa Personal Law in British India and Pakistan

The Qurʾān grants a childless widow a one-fourth share in the inheritance of her husband. However, this right is limited to movable property under the Ithnā ʿAsharīyya school in South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). In December 2021, Pakistan’s parliament extended a childless widow’s inheritance right to include immovable property under the Ithnā ʿAsharīyya school. This paper examines the historical processes that contributed to the formulation and subsequent reformulation of the legal rule governing the inheritance right of a childless widow under the Ithnā ʿAsharīyya school. It identifies distinct but interconnected phases in which sharīʿa was transformed within the institutional structure of the modern state during the colonial and post-colonial periods. By doing so, the paper highlights the fluidity of sharīʿa as a legal tradition, which adapted to changing circumstances in different historical contexts.