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36 CHAPTER 1on its “flexibility” and could adopt positions that seemed shocking, evenperverse, to many of their contemporaries. Unlike Thanawi’s careful demonstrationof how his proposed solution to the problem of dissolvingunwantedmarriages in the colonial context had roots in the medieval legaltradition, Madani does not explicitly invoke juristic discussions onwhether Muslims could continue to live amongnon-Muslims in non-Muslimlands. Such discussions do exist, however, and though it is impossibleto know how well-acquainted Madani was with them, it is not unlikelythat they exerted some influence on him.Since the first centuries of Islam, jurists have discussed the questionof the legal status of Muslim minorities living in non-Islamic states andterritories. As Khaled Abou El Fadl’s survey of the juristic discourses onMuslim minorities shows, the developed positions of the different schoolsof law date from the twelfth century, that is, from the time that juristswere confronted with the presence of substantial Muslim populations innon-Muslim lands. 89 With some exceptions, the Maliki jurists adoptedthe most uncompromisingposition on the question, insistingthat Muslimswho, because of conversion or conquest, find themselves in non-Muslim lands must migrate to a Muslim territory. 90 Other schools of lawwere more tolerant of the idea that Muslims might legitimately reside ina non-Muslim land as longas they were able to practice their religionopenly there. The Hanafis and the Shafi‘is believed that a territory thathad once been part of the dar al-Islam (‘the abode of Islam’) continuedto be so even after it had fallen into the hands of the non-Muslims, aslongas the Muslims were still able to practice their religion in that territory.91 The presence of Muslims in non-Muslim lands might in fact bebeneficial, and “might at times [even] be either recommended or obligatory”if, for instance, the continued Muslim residence and public practiceof their faith in non-Muslim lands could become the means of callingpeople to Islam there. 92 The ‘nationalist’ ‘ulama did entertain hopes of thefurther spread of Islam on the Indian subcontinent. 93 And Madani wasclearly echoingthe idea that Muslim residence in non-Muslim lands wasrecommended or even obligatory when, in the passage quoted in full earlier,he noted that “dependingon the given situation, [interaction withnon-Muslims] is at times obligatory, at other times recommended, at yetothers permissible, at others reprehensible, and in certain circumstancesit is forbidden.” 94The reasoningon which Madani’s political stance was based reveals aview of Islam that, ironically, is less reified than that of the modernistIqbal. This is ironic both in light of the hardening of the shari‘a in thecolonial context, as we have seen, and also because neither the scholarlynor the popular—let alone the Muslim modernist—perceptions of the‘ulama generally associate much flexibility with the ‘ulama’s view of the