Intro: Creatively Negotiated Transformations

Throughout the 19th century, constitutional language traveled rapidly across imperial and colonial worlds. Terms such as “law”, “constitution”, “rights”, and “representation” appeared with increasing frequency in places far removed from their original European genealogies.

Yet this circulation did not produce uniform meanings or predictable outcomes. Instead, constitutional vocabularies entered local debates shaped by inherited legal traditions, political institutions, and moral frameworks. The result was not simple imitation, but a series of creative negotiations over what law was supposed to do, whom it was meant to bind, and how authority should be constrained or justified.

The three articles in this colloquy explore those negotiations from distinct but complementary vantage points. They show that constitutionalism did not arrive outside Europe as a finished blueprint. Rather, it functioned as a flexible repertoire, one that could be deployed to confront arbitrariness, ward off colonial pressure, reorganize governance, or reaffirm existing sources of legitimacy. What unites these cases is not a shared institutional outcome, but a shared problem: how to render power accountable without dissolving the social and moral orders that sustained political life.

Reimagined to Regulate and Legitimize

In “Mirza Malkom Khan and the Politics of Legal Reform in 19th Century Iran”, Sara Zanotta examines how written law emerged as a response to uncertainty and discretionary rule. In this setting, legal reform was framed less as a rupture with inherited norms than as a means of stabilizing governance and making authority predictable. Codification promised to transform power by subjecting it to publicly articulated rules, while still allowing older legal and ethical frameworks to inform the content of those rules. Codified law here appears not as a foreign imposition, but as a remedy for arbitrariness, grounded in the belief that justice requires form, procedure, and general applicability. This approach highlights how demands for codification could arise from within existing traditions even as they drew on globally circulating concepts.

Kongsatja Suwanapech’s contribution “The Constitutional Petition That Changed Everything in Siam (Or Did It?)” turns to constitutional language as a site of cultural translation and friction. It shows how shared vocabularies could mask fundamentally different assumptions about political order. Constitutional terms that sounded familiar to European ears were mobilized locally for strategic purposes, often disconnected from popular sovereignty or democratic participation. In this case, constitutionalism functioned less as a mechanism for dispersing power than as a resource for defending autonomy and redefining legitimacy under imperial scrutiny. The encounter reveals that constitutional dialogue is rarely symmetrical: identical words can carry incompatible meanings depending on whether authority is imagined as mechanical, moral, or developmental.

The third text, “Constitution as Method in 1880s Egypt” by Mujeeb Khan, approaches constitutionalism as a method rather than a doctrine. Instead of asking whether constitutional ideas were imported or indigenous, it examines what those ideas were made to accomplish in practice. By focusing on procedures (consultation, constraint, administration, and execution), it shows how it was possible to integrate constitutional language into long-standing legal traditions and institutional settings. In this context, the constitution is not primarily a declaration of rights or a symbolic concession, but a regulatory framework that disciplines authority through rules, councils, and enforceable limits. Comparison across regions underscores that such methodological uses of constitutionalism were neither unique nor derivative but emerged from parallel efforts to govern change.

The actors who played a part in shaping these transformations were both anchored in local traditions and affected by global influences. An Iranian writer and diplomat who had studied in France ended up publishing an oppositional newspaper in London, inspired in equal parts by examples from Europe and from Muslim countries. A group of Siamese princes submitted a constitution drafted in London to their king, whose reply refuted the universality of European standards. In Egypt, a reformist scholar and later grand mufti conceptualized constitutionalism within Islamic legal tradition, blending the foreign with the local.

All three cases challenge linear narratives of constitutional diffusion. They suggest that constitutionalism’s global history is best understood not as a story about adoption of or resistance against European ideas, but as one of transformation. Law, in these contexts, was not merely borrowed; it was repurposed. And it was through this process of repurposing, which was deeply shaped by local institutions, intellectual traditions, and political pressures, that constitutional ideas acquired their force.

At the end of the 19th century, as the world shifted toward new global dynamics, regions situated within expanding imperial hierarchies were likewise confronting political reconfiguration. Compared to the instantaneity of 21st century communication, the 19th century can appear slow. However, just as ideas now spread quickly across social media, back then concepts of participation and government circulated through growing global interconnectedness.

This interconnectedness existed alongside imperial relationships that structured much of the period, with discussions of participation and legal constraint arising in imperial centers and entering territories subject to varying degrees of external control. Such discussions have often been presented purely as the introduction of Euro-American ideals of governance. But were concepts of participation and constraint on power really foreign to these settings?

At the time, Egypt was not alone in experimenting with constitutional forms, as the 1861 Tunisian constitution and later Ottoman constitutional developments similarly reflected broader regional efforts to reorganize political authority under modern imperial pressures.¹ The case of Egypt provides useful insight into how local legal orders operated under such pressure.

ʿAbduh and the Legal Bodies

Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) was an Egyptian jurist, reformist scholar, and later grand mufti of Egypt whose writings reshaped debates on Islamic law, governance, and constitutional reform in the late nineteenth century. Writing during the period of Ottoman suzerainty, European financial control, and British occupation after 1882, he intervened in debates over law, consultation, and political authority.

Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) conceptualized a constitutional order based on *dustūr* (a constitution), *qānūn* (statutory law), and representative consultative councils (*majālis al-shūrā*).

Prior to becoming grand mufti of Egypt, ʿAbduh articulated a framework that the dominant historiography has long characterized as a foreign import, yet the vocabulary he deployed was reconstructed within, and authorized by, the Islamic legal tradition he inhabited. He noted that authority was to move from an absolute personal form to a consultative order, and that such order would be held in place by named fixtures: dustūr (a constitution), qānūn (statutory law), and representative consultative councils (majālis al-shūrā).² ʿAbduh’s conceptualization produced a shūrawiyya (consultative government) based on both constitution and code.

By coupling the transformation with dustūr and qānūn, and by placing representative councils in the same line, ʿAbduh described constitutionalism as bound by both code and an internal consultative body, blending the foreign with the local. In doing so, he also established a system of authority that was constrained by a constitution, statutes, and a representative body that stood for the country. The hybridity of the system, however, was not mere synthesis. Constitutional language travels, but its authority does not travel intact, as this case shows: the constitutional language was reconstituted within the normative grammar that received it.³

Grounded in Tradition

The Qurʾān formed the foundational framework for legal thought, and ʿAbduh maintained the same constitutional approach in his interpretive analysis of the Qurʾān, specifically of chapter Āl ʿImrān (3):159:⁴ “…and consult them in your affairs. When you make a decision, put your trust in God; surely, God loves those who place trust in Him.” ʿAbduh’s reading did not emerge in isolation. It participated in a long exegetical debate over what the command to “consult” required of political authority. In this verse, the Prophet is commanded to seek consultation. ʿAbduh incorporated this commandment into support of his conception of action by consultation (al-ʿamal bi-l-mushāwara).

Classical legal exegesis provides more than one way to read Q 3:159 (“wa-shāwirhum fī al-amr”), and that range matters for how ʿAbduh was able to mobilize the verse as method rather than as slogan.⁵ His deployment of the verse operated within the established exegetical range rather than outside it. That was the key move: constitutional vocabulary did not function as an imported doctrine. Its authority was grounded in established modes of reasoning, not in its external origin.

Constitutional vocabulary did not function as an imported doctrine. Its authority was grounded in established modes of reasoning, not in its external origin.

For the ʿIrāqī Ḥanafi al-Jaṣṣāṣ (d. 981), the command to consult was to be treated as a real procedural directive, and the dispute he registered was about scope: whether consultation was confined to temporal affairs (umūr al-dunyā) or whether it also bore on religious and legal judgment.⁶ In other words, classical jurists already debated how far consultation extended. Jaṣṣāṣ illustrated consultation through concrete Prophetic events, specifically the battles of Badr and the ditch, as proof that mushāwara was employed as a working mechanism of leadership under pressure.⁷

The Andalusian (Iberian) Mālikī Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1148) pushed the same verse in a more restrictive direction: consultation was framed as counsel in war or policy practice, not as delegated authority over revealed rulings. Ibn al-ʿArabī explicitly identified the intended referent as “al-istishāra fī al-ḥarb” (consultation in war) and treated “al-aḥkām” (normative rulings grounded in revelation) as outside the domain of discretionary “raʾy” (discretionary forms of interpretive judgment) in this sense.⁸ In this locus, Badr anchored the argument as the paradigmatic site of consultation (camp-placement counsel; deliberation over captives), precisely because those were domains where tactical judgment operated and where consultation functioned as governance rather than as a source of legal normativity.⁹

Rather than projecting an idealized Islamic past onto these texts, ʿAbduh’s constitutional positioning, therefore, extended conversations present within Islamic discourse from classical scholarship. Both Jaṣṣāṣ and Ibn ʿArabī were influential exegetes and scholars in their respective legal traditions, and ʿAbduh’s reading of the Qurʾān approached meaning through a standard interpretive lens.

From Normative to Operational

ʿAbduh further clarified his perspective on administration in his analysis of how the canonical institution of al-Azhar should be managed. By ʿAbduh’s time, al-Azhar had stood for almost a millennium as a continuous authoritative center of Islamic learning and scholarly production, through multiple empires and dynasties. In article two of Qānūn al-Azhar, the author set out the duty of the Shaykh al-Azhar, who was tasked with regulations and the decisions of Majlis al-Idāra (Administrative Committee), and who chose the means to improve al-Azhar and managed affairs within the limits of law and council decisions. As checks on the Shaykh al-Azhar’s power, statutes and the council’s decisions remained in place as operational measures. The legal implications drew on the constraining force of articulated statute as regulatory power rather than as symbolic concession.¹⁰

ʿAbduh described dustūr as a foundational governing ordinance that functioned as an enforceable constraint on the exercise of authority rather than merely as a symbolic concession. Whether in his tripartite construction of dustūr, qānūn, and consultative councils, or in his administrative framework for managing al-Azhar through Majlis al-Idāra, ʿAbduh developed a method in which rulers were bound to a foundational governing ordinance and deliberative constraint.

The al-Azhar mosque, an authoritative center of Islamic learning and scholarly production through multiple empires and dynasties. © K.A.C. Creswell Islamic Architecture Photograph Collection; Rare Books and Special Collections Library; the American University in Cairo

Thus, the question is not whether European constitutional language appears in Egypt. It does. The question is what that language was asked to do, and what parts of the existing Islamic legal world gave it enforcement power. The answer draws not on theories added after the fact, but on the language found across the passages: transform, constrain, consult, decide, execute. The framework for transforming, constraining, and consulting was internal to ʿAbduh’s sources and the Islamic tradition he parsed. The source of this constitutional vocabulary and the structure of its application are analytically distinct.

The normative resources for constraining authority existed within Islamic legal reasoning. What was absent under conditions of despotism was their institutional binding force. ʿAbduh’s own answer, in his articles on consultation and despotism published in al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya in December 1881, was direct: a ruler who acted on his own opinion alone (istabadda bi-raʾyihi) could simply bypass them. Constitutional vocabulary (dustūr, qānūn, consultative council) was the means of converting internal normative principles into operational, publicly legible, enforceable governance.¹¹

A Comparative Note

The methodological reorganization visible in Cairo was not an isolated event, and questions of constitutionality and regulatory constraint were not unique to Egypt or the Islamicate world. In Meiji Japan, such discussions of and efforts at transformative government were also underway. Much like ʿAbduh, Fukuzawa Yukichi (d. 1901) was an intellectual visionary for his nation’s future. Like ʿAbduh, he contemplated the construction and parameters of such government. In a Jiji Shimpō editorial in February 1889, Fukuzawa identified how a constitution was normally “the child of national disorder” (kokuran no ko 國亂の子).¹²

Roughly 10,000 km to the east, Fukuzawa Yukichi contemplated the construction and parameters of a transformative government, much like Muḥammad ʿAbduh in Cairo.

Reorganizing Authority

Egypt provides a particularly revealing case of how constitutional vocabulary was rearticulated within an existing juristic grammar under imperial constraint. A comparative analysis with Meiji Japan suggests that this methodological reorganization of authority was not unique to Cairo. Like ʿAbduh, Fukuzawa Yukichi grappled with how externally circulating constitutional forms could be used to reorganize and constrain authority within existing political and intellectual traditions.

The concepts of participation and constraint on state power were not uniquely Euro-American, nor was their application in these settings simply the product of European transmission. Constitutional vocabulary did circulate through European political discourse. What is at issue is not its origin but its operation: as it entered Egypt, its meaning was not fixed by its source but reconstructed within existing legal frameworks.Local intellectuals treated constitutionalism as a method of ordering authority. For ʿAbduh, constitutionalism was not foreign doctrine imposed from outside, but a disciplined rearticulation of governance grounded in Islamic legal reasoning, drawing on European constitutional vocabulary while determining its operative meaning from within.

Kenneth J. Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 31–35. ↩︎
Muḥammad ʿAbduh, al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmila, 5 vols., Beirut and Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq, 1993, 1:381–395; originally published as “Fī al-Shūrā wa-l-Istibḍād,” “Fī al-Shūrā,” and “Al-Shūrā wa-l-Qānūn,” al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya, nos. 1279, 1280, 1290 (12, 13, 25 December 1881). ↩︎
Ibid., 1:381–395. ↩︎
ʿAbduh, Aʿmāl, vol. 5, pp. 118–20. Qurʾān 3:159; translation adapted from Muṣṭafā Khaṭṭāb, The Clear Qurʾān: A Thematic English Translation, Book of Signs Foundation, 2016. ↩︎
Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Rāzī al-Jaṣṣāṣ, Aḥkām al-Qurʾān, Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2022, commentary on Q 3:159, pp. 583–585; Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-ʿArabī, Aḥkām al-Qurʾān, 4 vols., Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al- ʿIlmiyya, vol. 1, commentary on Q 3:159, pp. 389–391. ↩︎
Jaṣṣāṣ, Aḥkām, pp. 584, 585. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 584. ↩︎
Ibn al-ᶜArabī, Aḥkām, p. 389. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 389-390. ↩︎
ʿAbduh, Aʿmāl, vol. 3, p. 197. ↩︎
Muḥammad ʿAbduh, “Fī al-Shūrā wa-l-Istibḍād,” al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya, no. 1279, 12 December 1881, in al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmila, vol. 1, pp. 381–382. ↩︎
Jiji Shimpō, “Kenpō happu uwasa no machimachi” 憲法發布うわさの區々, 11 Feb. 1889 (editorial), p. 17; and “Nihon Kokkai Engi” 日本国会縁起, 11 Feb. 1889, p. 20 (source of kokuran no ko 國亂の子), in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshū(Complete works of Fukuzawa Yukichi), vol. 12, pp. 17–20, Tokyo: Iwanami, 1960. ↩︎