A cornerstone of French land policy in colonial Protectorate Morocco (1912–56) was to restrict jurisdiction of sharīʿa courts while maintaining sharīʿa-based property laws in French courts. This article examines the Islamic property concept of shufʿa (the right of “preemption” or “first-refusal” for co-owned land) as adjudicated in sharīʿa courts and French courts of colonial-era Morocco. Both jurisdictions claimed to uphold the provisions of shufʿa stipulated by the Mālikī legal school of Islamic law; however, the French courts used a codified version—le droit de préemption—while relying on property facts established by the new colonial institution of land registration (Fr., immatriculation foncière; Ar., taḥfīẓ ʿaqārī). By analyzing paradigmatic shufʿa disputes in each jurisdiction, the article argues that evidence and procedure are critical to understanding Islamic law’s encounter with the colonial state. Most importantly, French courts implemented a hybrid version of Islamic property law in which immatriculation supplanted Islamic legal modes of proof making. The French hybrid approach thus constituted a competing version of state sharīʿa that was mutually exclusive with the sharīʿa courts and persisted into the post-colonial period. This discussion more broadly seeks to center property, evidence, and judicial procedure in scholarly narratives concerning twentieth-century Islamic legal history.

ʿAmal (judicial practice) is a critical feature of post-classical Islamic law of the Mālikī school in the Maghrib. The scholars who have examined ʿamal contend that it presents a paradigm of Mālikī law’s flexibility and judicial responsiveness to custom (ʿurf). However, ʿamal also constitute a significant part of the regional Islamic juristic literature produced from approximately the 17th to nineteenth centuries. In this article, I examine how ʿamal of Fez became not only widely practiced but part of the mainstream Mālikī jurisprudential discourse in Morocco. I argue that understanding Islamic law’s mechanisms for discursive stability is critical for its well-established capacity to change through principles like ʿamal. I do so by analyzing three practices that contravened the prevailing Mālikī rule yet were widely practiced as ʿamal of Fez: female witnesses for spousal defects, the ṣafqa unilateral shared property sale, and the lafīfiyya twelve-person testimony (plus a fourth “counter-example,” the abandonment of the mutual spousal cursing oath (liʿān), that reinforces the argument). I pay special attention to jurists’ discursive techniques for entrenching ʿamal in Mālikī history and precedence in classical substantive Mālikī rules. In the end, I call to acknowledge ʿamal’s inextricable status as Islamic law in Morocco and beyond.

Allal al-Fassi is one of the most formative figures in twentieth-century Moroccan intellectual history. Most scholarship on al-Fassi focuses on either his political manoeuvring (colonial and post-colonial) or his vision of Islamic modernism in the 1950s–60s. In this paper, I propose to bridge these two aspects of al-Fassi’s multifaceted life by examining two specific issues that occupied his post-colonial political and intellectual endeavors. The first is the 1957 Moroccan Personal Status Code (Mudawwana) for which al-Fassi served on the codification commission. The second is the 1965 Law of Legal Unification, in support of which al-Fassi intervened publicly. In both cases, al-Fassi underscored the political stakes of supporting these initiatives in the new state while insisting that they preserved Islamic legal tradition. Using multiple source materials, I argue that al-Fassi promoted each initiative by envisioning a flexible all-encompassing Islamic legal tradition as the ultimate foil to Morocco’s colonial past. Al-Fassi’s construction of historical narrative is particularly crucial to ground both political initiatives in Islamic precedent. I ultimately propose that al-Fassi’s use of these argumentative methods stands out as much as the substance of the projects themselves.