details concerning them. This may be done under
the four following heads viz. History and Arrangement
of the Laws,;—Forms of Judicatory,—
Givil Laws, and Penal Laws.
As in other departments, so in that of the laWs,
the Hindus, the Arabs, or both, have imparted a
share of their learning to the Indian islanders.
The laws of all the civilized tribes consist, accordingly,
of a commixture of native customs and of
Hindu and Mahomedan jurisprudence. From the
remarkable opposition which exists in the state o
society among the Indian islanders, and that of the
Hindus and Arabs, We must be prepared to find that
the peculiar codes of the two latter people would
be but very partially adopted by the former,—
that laws framed for a populous country, in which
the Odious institution of the castes Was rigidly established,
or for the shepherds of the arid and
sterile plains of Arabia, could riot be transferred,
without modification, to the simple, rude, and
scanty population of the verdant and luxuriant
islands of the equator.
The reigning religion of the Archipelago, as has
been fully described in another department of this
work, is the Mahomedan, which necessarily implies
the inseparable existence of the Mahomedan law.
In a period of about two centuries and a half which
elapsed from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning
of the sixteenth century, almost all the
considerable nations of the Indian islands adopted
the Mahomedan religion, the work of conversion
commencing naturally from the west and proceeding
eastward. The degree in which they have
adopted the laws and doctrines of Mahomed have
been proportioned to the degree of civilization in
which the natives were found, and to the greater
nr smaller intercourse which has since subsisted
between them and the Mahomedan nations of the
west.
The Mahomedan law is nominally established
among the whole of the converted tribes, and in
penal and ecclesiastical jurisprudence is followed
pretty closely. Tracts on Mahomedan law, following
the doctrines of Shafthi, or his pupils, are
in circulation in every country of the Archipelago,
accompanied occasionally with commentaries or
translations in the vernacular languages. To fur-
nish any detailed account of these would be foreign
to the nature of my undertaking, the object of
which is to delineate the peculiar features of a state
of society widely different from that for which the
.friahomedan code was framed, or its commentaries
composed. The state of society among all the tribes
of the Indian islanders differs so essentially from the
latter, that, notwithstanding the avowed supremacy
of Mahomedan law, it is hardly applied in any case,
without considerable latitude and modification. > Local
usages and customs are covertly of authority,