The legal politics of Islamic bioethics: drunk driving and the reconfiguration of privacy in the modern Gulf

Science and technology have been long-standing dimensions of the political legitimation of monarchic, shaikhly and imperial rule in the modern Gulf. Scientific development has been supported by attendant sociotechnical imaginaries, but these imaginaries have not been without fissures or contradictions. In the modern Gulf sheikhdoms, sociotechnical imaginaries were fashioned at the intersection of local, regional, and imperial processes. A range of actors participated in these contestations, drawing on shifting cultural ideas about human frailty and progress, continuing social and economic exchanges across the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean, and varying experiences of imperial constraint and possibility. This article examines how Islamic legal actors in Qatar shaped sociotechnical contestations in the course of the twentieth century. Focusing on medical technology and the problem of drunk driving in the 1960s, I show how Islamic procedural law became connected to new regimes of expertise and modern forms of power inextricably tied to the Qatari nation-state. I suggest that the Islamic legal concepts mobilized by the ulama, which initially served to protect a space of Muslim privacy against technological anonymity and the regulatory ambitions of the modern state, became increasingly unintelligible as the expansive logics of state bureaucracy were adopted and naturalized.