Arun Shourie’s monumental work The World of Fatwas or The Shariah in Action represents one of the most comprehensive scholarly examinations of Islamic jurisprudence in practice within the Indian subcontinent. This book, drawing from over 18,000 pages of primary source material across forty volumes of fatwa collections, provides an unprecedented window into the mechanism by which Islamic religious law operates at the grassroots level. Shourie’s work is particularly significant for its methodical analysis of five major fatwa collections spanning different Islamic schools of thought – the Barelvi Fatawa-i-Rizvia, the Deobandi Fatawa-i-Ulema Dar al-Ulum, and others. This comprehensive approach allows readers to understand not merely isolated religious pronouncements, but the systematic worldview that underpins Islamic…