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The Book of the Desert

The Worldview of an Early Nineteenth-Century Muslim Scholar in the Saharan West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2024

Ismail Warscheid Open the ORCID record for Ismail Warscheid [Opens in a new window]
Translated by
Rodney Coward
Ismail Warscheid*
Affiliation:
Institut de recherches et d’histoire des textes, CNRS [email protected]
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Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of the Book of the Desert (Kitāb al-Bādiya), a nineteenth-century legal treatise composed by Muḥammad al-Māmī (d. 1282/1865), a Muslim scholar from the Tiris desert in present-day Mauritania. Al-Māmī’s text reflects on the adaptation of sharia—the religious law of Islam—to the needs of pastoral populations in the Saharan West. How to embrace a normative system seemingly incompatible with nomadic life, given that it presupposes a state governed by an Islamic ruler (imām) and considers the city the natural environment of legal institutions? Challenging the narratives of center-periphery and the so-called post-classical “decline” that continue to structure the field of Islamic intellectual history, the article explores the different contextual layers of al-Māmī’s reasoning. He was a religious notable deeply involved in power struggles between nomadic groups and a fervent supporter of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jihad movements in West Africa. But he was also a jurist of the Maliki school, who approached his society from the perspective of Islamic legal thought, and a Bedouin preoccupied with the legal and religious implications of the cultural gulf between his world and that of the towns.

Cet article propose une analyse du Livre du désert (Kitābal-bādiya), un traité de droit composé par Muḥammad al-Māmī (m. 1282/1865), un lettré musulman originaire des déserts du Tiris dans l’actuelle Mauritanie. Dans son ouvrage, l’auteur réfléchit sur l’adaptation de la charia – la loi religieuse de l’islam – aux besoins des populations pastorales de l’Ouest saharien : comment s’approprier un système normatif a priori insensible aux contextes nomades, étant donné que celui-ci postule l’autorité d’un État dirigé par un souverain islamique (imām) comme garant de son implémentation et suppose la ville comme cadre de l’exercice de la justice ? L’article restitue les différents contextes dans lesquels s’inscrit le propos d’al-Māmī : celui d’un notable religieux à la fois engagé dans les luttes de pouvoir entre groupes nomades et fervent partisan des mouvements de djihad en Afrique de l’Ouest aux xviiie et xixe siècles, celui d’un jurisconsulte malikite qui pense sa société dans le cadre du droit musulman postclassique, celui d’un bédouin s’interrogeant sur les implications juridico-religieuses de la distance culturelle qui sépare son monde de celui des sédentaires. Tout l’enjeu est de remettre en question les notions de centre/périphérie et de « déclin » postclassique qui continuent à structurer le champ de l’histoire intellectuelle de l’islam.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , First View , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
© Éditions de l’EHESS 2024

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Footnotes

This article was first published as “Le Livre du desert. La vision du monde d’un lettré musulman de l’Ouest saharien au xixe siècle,” Annales HSS 73, no. 2 (2018): 359–84. It was translated from the French by Rodney Coward and edited by Victoria Harris and Chloe Morgan.

*

The material presented here was gathered during a residence in Mauritania in November 2016. I wish to express my gratitude to Mohamedou Meyine, Ahmed Maouloud Eida El-Hilal, Abdel Wedoud known as Deddoud Ould Abdellahi, Mohammed el-Barnaoui, and al-Tijani Ould Abdel Hamid for their help and support. I would also like to thank Camille Lefebvre and Augustin Jomier for their enlightening comments on the first version of this article.

References

1. Ulrich Rebstock, Maurische Literaturgeschichte, 3 vols. (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2001); John O. Hunwick, ed., Arabic Literature of Africa, vol. 4, The Writings of Western Sudanic Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Charles C. Stewart, ed., Arabic Literature of Africa, vol. 5, part 2, The Writings of Mauritania and the Western Sahara (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon, eds., The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy, and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Ghislaine Lydon, “Inkwells of the Sahara: Reflections on the Production of Islamic Knowledge in Bilād Shinqīṭ,” in The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa, ed. Scott S. Reese (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 39–71.

2. See Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), to whom we owe probably the most fully developed version of this theory.

3. The term “sharia” refers to the juridical-religious normativity contained in the sources of the Islamic revelation, whereas the notion of fiqh refers both to the knowledge that serves to explicate these prescriptions and to the system of norms and rules arising from these efforts at explication and interpretation. See Baber Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Muslim Law (1964; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Bernard G. Weiss, The Spirit of Islamic Law (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

4. Rainer Oßwald, Schichtengesellschaft und islamisches Recht. Die Zawāyā und Krieger der Westsahara im Spiegel von Rechtsgutachten des 16.–19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1993); Mohamed El Mokhtar Ould Bah, La littérature juridique et l’évolution du malikisme en Mauritanie (Tunis: Université de Tunis, 1981); Yaḥyā Wuld al-Baraʾ, Al-Majmūʿat al-kubrā. Al-shāmilat li-fatāwā wa nawāzil wa aḥkām ahl gharb wa janūb gharb al-Ṣaḥrāʾ, 12 vols. (Nouakchott: al-Sharīf Mawlāy al-Ḥasan bin al-Mukhtār bin al-Ḥasan, 2009).

5. Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Yahya Ould El-Bara, “Fiqh, société et pouvoir. Étude des soucis et préoccupations socio-politiques des théologiens-légistes maures (fuqahā) à partir de leurs consultations juridiques (fatāwā), du xviie au xxe siècle” (PhD diss., EHESS, 1998); Ismail Warscheid, Droit musulman et société au Sahara prémoderne. La justice islamique dans les oasis du Grand Touat (Algérie) aux xviie–xixe  siècles (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

6. The Maliki school stems from the teaching of the Medina-based jurist, Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/795). It developed especially in the Islamic West and Egypt.

7. The edition used for this study was published by the Centre des études sahariennes in Rabat, and is a reissue of the text published in 2007 by the Association of the Descendants of Muḥammad al-Māmī: al-Shaykh Muḥammad al-Māmī b. al-Bukhārī al-Bariki, Kitāb al-bādiya wa-nuṣūṣ ukhrā (Rabat: Publications du Centre des études sahariennes, 2014), hereafter Kitāb al-bādiya.

8. There exist two monographs in Arabic on al-Māmī and his works: Muḥammad Wuld Aḥmad al-Barnāwī, Al-khilāf wa-l-ikhtilāf wa-l-istikhlāf aw al-ʿaw wa-l-sharʿ wa-l-sulṭa al-siyāsiya fī-l-janūb al-gharbī li-l-gharb al-islāmī bidāyat al-qarn al-tāsiʿʿashara. Muḥāwala ḥafr ḥawla fikr al-shaykh Muḥammad al-Māmi [sic] (1865–1780) (Nouakchott: Institut Sidi Abdalla Ould el Fadhel pour la recherche scientifique, 2010); and Muḥammad Wuld Aḥmad al-Barnāwī, Al-shaykh Muḥammad al-Māmi [sic] b. al-Bukhārī: al-walī, al-ʿālim, al-mujaddid (Nouakchott: s.n., 2012). I would like to express my warm thanks to Mohamed Ould Barnaoui for kindly presenting me with a copy of each of these books.

9. In particular, he transposed into ten thousand lines of verse what was then the principal textbook for Maliki law, the Mukhtaṣar, by the Egyptian jurist Khalīl b. Iṣḥāq al-Jundī (d. 767/1374). Throughout the Sahel and Sahara, the widespread practice of versifying aimed to facilitate the memorization (ḥifẓ) of such texts, an ability which represented both the educational ideal of the time and a response to the dearth of paper in the region. On the curriculum studied by Sahelo-Saharan scholars, see Bruce S. Hall and Charles C. Stewart, “The Historic ‘Core Curriculum’ and the Book Market in Islamic West Africa,” in Krätli and Lydon, The Trans-Saharan Book Trade, 109–74.

10. Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, “Théologie du désordre. Islam, ordre et désordre au Sahara,” L’année du Maghreb 7 (2011): 61–77. By studying al-Māmī’s representation of the Saharan West as a land of anarchy (bilād al-sāʾiba) torn by rivalries between different nomadic groups, this anthropologist sheds light on the inscription of the text and its author in the sociopolitical context of the early nineteenth century.

11. Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, “De quoi le Sahara est-il le nom ? Images du Sahara et des Sahariens dans Kitāb al-bādiya d’al-Shaykh Muhammad al-Mâmi” (paper presented at the international congress entitled “Le Sahara, lieux d’histoire et espace d’échanges,” Guelmim, Morocco, May 26–28, 2016), 9. I thank the author for giving me access to the manuscript of his presentation.

12. Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 27–31.

13. Rainer Oßwald, Die Handelsstädte der Westsahara. Die Entwicklung der arabisch-maurischen Kultur von Šinqīṭ, Wādān, Tīšīt und Walāta (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1986); Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, “Nomadisme, Islam et pouvoir dans la société maure précoloniale (xie siècle–xixe siècle). Essai sur quelques aspects du tribalisme” (PhD diss., Université Paris Descartes, 1985), and, by the same author, Éléments d’histoire de la Mauritanie (Nouakchott: Institut mauritanien de recherche scientifique, 1991).

14. Bruce S. Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

15. The expression refers to an area stretching from Oued Noun in Morocco to the valley of the Senegal River, and from the Atlantic coast to the Azawad region in the north of present-day Mali. See Khalīl al-Naḥwī, Bilād Shinqīṭ al-manāra wa-l-ribāṭ. ʿArḍ li-l-ḥayāt al-ʿilmiyya wa-l-ishāʿ al-thaqāfī wa-l-jihād al-dīnī min khilāl al-jāmiʿāt al-badawiya al-mutanaqila (al-maḥāḍir) (Tunis: al-Munaẓẓama al-ʿarabiyya li-tarbiya wa-l-thaqāfa wa-l-ʿulūm, 1978), 24–56.

16. There exists an abundant anthropological and historical literature on nasab. See, in particular, the work of Pierre Bonte, Timothy Cleaveland, Sophie Caratini, Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, Bruce Hall, Rainer Oßwald, Ulrich Rebstock, Ghislaine Lydon, Ann McDougall, Muhammad Ould Saad, and Charles Stewart.

17. In order to better preserve the specificities of Muslim scholarly discourse, I have chosen to translate the term qabīla as “lineage group” rather than the more conventional “tribe.”

18. Muhammed Al Muhtar W. As-saʾd, “Émirats et espace émiral maure. Le cas du Trārza aux xviiie–xixe siècles,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 54 (1989): 53–82; Pierre Bonte, L’émirat de l’Adrar mauritanien. Harîm, compétition et protection dans une société tribale saharienne (Paris: Karthala, 2008); Ould Cheikh, Éléments d’histoire de la Mauritanie; Raymond A. Taylor, “L’émirat pré-colonial et l’histoire contemporaine en Mauritanie,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 38 (1999): 53–69.

19. This phenomenon is not restricted to the Saharan West but can be found in most parts of the Islamic West, including the Tuareg world, the Fulbe area, and the Ibadite communities. See Fanny Colonna, “Saints furieux et saints studieux ou, dans l’Aurès, comment la religion vient aux tribus,” Annales HSS 35, no. 3/4 (1980): 642–62; Jocelyne Dakhlia, L’oubli de la cité. La mémoire collective à l’épreuve du lignage dans le Jérid tunisien (Paris: La Découverte, 1990); Augustin Jomier, “Un réformisme islamique dans l’Algérie coloniale. Oulémas ibadites et société du Mzab (ca. 1880–ca. 1979)” (PhD diss., Université du Maine, 2015); Harry Thirwall Norris, The Tuaregs: Their Islamic Legacy and Its Diffusion in the Sahel (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1975); Warscheid, Droit musulman et société au Sahara prémoderne, 28–54.

20. Benjamin Acloque, “De la constitution d’un territoire à sa division. L’adaptation des Ahl Bârikalla aux évolutions sociopolitiques de l’Ouest saharien (xviie–xxie siècles),” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue canadienne des études africaines 48, no. 1 (2014): 119–43. The term Gibla or Guebla, which alludes to the orientation (qibla) towards Mecca for prayer, refers to the south of present-day Mauritania, that is, the Trarza and Brakna regions north of the Senegal River.

21. Philip D. Curtin, “Jihad in West Africa: Early Phases and Interrelations in Mauritania and Senegal,” Journal of African History 12, no. 1 (1971): 11–24; Ould Cheikh, “Nomadisme, Islam et pouvoir”; David Robinson, “The Islamic Revolution of Futa Toro,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 8, no. 2 (1975): 185–221.

22. Kitāb al-bādiya, 228.

23. Ould Cheikh, “De quoi le Sahara est-il le nom ?”

24. Ould Cheikh, “Théologie du désordre,” 66.

25. Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016).

26. The authoritative study remains David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

27. Jacques Berque, “Les hilaliens repentis ou l’Algérie rurale au xve siècle d’après un manuscrit jurisprudentiel,” Annales ESC 25, no. 5 (1970): 1325–53; Sarah Binay, Die Figur des Beduinen in der arabischen Literatur 9.–12. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 2006); Stefan Leder, “Nomadische Lebensformen und ihre Wahrnehmung im Spiegel der arabischen Terminologie,” Die Welt des Orients 34 (2004): 72–104; Élise Voguet, “Dissidence affirmée ou rejet codifié de la Umma. Badawî et ‘arab dans les Nawâzil Mâzuna,” in “Les territoires productifs en question(s) : Transformations occidentales et situations maghrébines,” special issue, Alfa : Maghreb et sciences sociales (2006): 147–57.

28. Kitāb al-bādiya, 175.

29. Thomas A. Bauer, Die Kultur der Ambiguität. Eine andere Geschichte des Islam (Frankfurt: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011), 20–24.

30. Sherman A. Jackson, Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī (Leiden: Brill, 1996).

31. Noel James Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964); Yvon Linant de Bellefonds, Traité de droit musulman comparé, 3 vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1965–1973); Schacht, Introduction to Islamic Law; Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law, 42–72; Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 54–72.

32. Kitāb al-bādiya, 131.

33. Joseph Schacht, “Classicisme, traditionalisme et ankylose dans la loi religieuse de l’Islam,” in Classicisme et déclin culturel dans l’histoire de l’Islam, ed. Robert Brunshvig and Gustave E. Von Grunebaum (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1977), 141–66, here p. 141.

34. This methodology was developed by Muslim jurists between the eighth and the ninth centuries in order to derive norms from the Islamic revelation. The expression “foundation” (aṣl, plur. uṣūl) is a reference to the four sources of normativity on which Muslim jurists agree: the Quran, the prophetic tradition (Sunna), analogical reasoning (qiyās), and consensus (ijmāʿ). The term ijtihād refers to the mastery of this methodology which enables the mujtahid to derive norms autonomously, unlike the muqallid who has to content himself with applying the rules and principles laid out by mujtahid jurists of his school. Over the centuries, Muslim jurists have forged an entire hierarchy identifying different types of ijtihād and taqlīd. See Wael B. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunnī Uṣūl al-Fiqh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On the hierarchies among Muslim jurists, see Norman Calder, “Al-Nawawī’s Typology of Muftīs and Its Significance for a General Theory of Islamic Law,” Islamic Law and Society 3, no. 2 (1996): 137–64.

35. Mohammed Fadel, “The Social Logic of Taqlīd and the Rise of the Mukhataṣar,” Islamic Law and Society 3, no. 2 (1996): 193–233; Oßwald, Schichtengesellschaft und islamisches Recht, 12–21.

36. Andrew Hapin, Reasoning with Law (London: Hart Publishing, 2001); Tamar Frankel, “Of Theory and Practice,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 77, no. 1 (2001): 5–28.

37. Kitāb al-bādiya, 131.

38. Jackson, Islamic Law and the State. This work offers the fullest analysis of the notion of taqlīd, based on a meticulous reading of the work of the Egyptian Maliki jurist Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfi (d. 682/1283 or 684/1285).

39. Kitāb al-bādiya, 131. The term “fatwa” refers to a legal opinion bearing on a specific point in sharia or its application. A fatwa obeys a dialectical logic—that is, it is always formulated in answer to an explicit request (istiftāʾ) made by an inquirer (mustaftī). The identity of the latter can vary: although from its beginnings in the seventh century the issuing of a fatwa was intended above all to provide a framework for the action of Muslim judges, many sovereigns and political dignitaries turned to the muftis to legitimize their decisions from a religious perspective. See Wael B. Hallaq, “From Fatwās to Furūʿ: Growth and Change in Islamic Substantive Law,” Islamic Law and Society 1, no. 1 (1994): 29–65; Muhammad Khalid Masud, Brinkley Messick, and David S. Powers, eds., Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

40. Kitāb al-bādiya, 128.

41. Ibid., 218, for instance. In order to understand the expression, one needs to know that, in the jargon of fiqh, the term qawl (affirmation) refers to making a doctrinal statement.

42. Ibid., 131.

43. Ibid., 132.

44. Ibid., 131. Al-Māmī refers to the Ashʿarite school which, in Muslim theology (kalām), effectively adopted a position midway between muʿtazilite rationalism and traditionalist positions. See Jan Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr: The Emergence and Consolidation of Ashaʿrism (Fourth–Fifth/Tenth–Eleventh Century),” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology, ed. Sabine Schmidtke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 225–41.

45. The term takhrīj refers to the solution of a hitherto unexamined case according to the casuistic methodology handed down within the framework of the juridical school, whereas that of tarjīḥ refers to the choice between contradictory juridical opinions. See Hallaq, “Fatwās to Furūʿ,” 51–52; Hallaq, “Takhrīj and the Construction of Juristic Authority,” in Studies in Islamic Legal Theory, ed. Bernard Weiss (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 337–64; Jackson, Islamic Law and the State.

46. Kitāb al-bādiya, 175.

47. On this figure, see al-Tijānī Wuld ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, Sīdī ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Ḥājj Ibrāhīm al-ʿAlawī bayna muqtaḍiyyāt al-aḥwāl fī-l-majāl wa dawāfiʿ al-raghba fī-l-tajdīd wa sadd al-firāgh (Nouakchott: Imprimerie nouvelle, 2010).

48. Sīdī ʿAbd Allāh bin al-Ḥājj Ibrāhīm al-ʿAlawī al-Shinqīṭī, Ṭarad al-ḍawāl wa-l-humal ʿan al-kurūʿ fī ḥiyāḍ masāʾil al-ʿamal (Idleb: Najeebawaih Manuscripts Center, s. d.). I wish to thank Wuld ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd for presenting me with a copy of this book.

49. Ibid., 39–44.

50. Kitāb al-bādiya, 99–123. On the ḥāshiya as a genre, see Ahmed El Shamsy, “The Ḥāshiya in Islamic Law: A Sketch of the Shāfiʿī Literature,” Oriens: Journal of Philosophy, Theology and Science in Islamic Societies 41, no. 3/4 (2013): 289–315.

51. Kitāb al-bādiya, 127.

52. Ibid., 147.

53. Muḥammad al-Mukhtār Wuld Saʿd, Al-Fatāwā wa-l-tāʾrīkh. Dirāsa li-maẓāhir al-ḥayāt al-iqtiṣādiyya wa-l-ijtimaʿiyya fī Mawritāniyā min khilāl fiqh al-nawāzil (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2000).

54. This is a reference to the garrison towns (miṣr, plur. amṣār) founded during the great conquests of the first centuries of Islam, such as Basra, Kufa, Kairouan, and Fustat, the future city of Cairo.

55. Kitāb al-bādiya, 147.

56. Ould Cheikh, “De quoi le Sahara est-il le nom ?” 8–9.

57. Kitāb al-bādiya, 175.

58. Ibid., 177.

59. Ibid., 176 and 205.

60. Houari Touati, “Le prince et la bête. Enquête sur une métaphore pastorale,” Studia Islamica 83, no. 1 (1996): 101–19.

61. Kitāb al-bādiya, 177. See also Ould Cheikh, “Théologie du désordre,” 65.

62. Rahal Boubrik, “Les fuqahâ’ du prince et le prince des fuqahâ’. Discours politique des hommes de religion au pays maure (Mauritanie, xviie–xixe siècle),” Afrique et histoire 7, no. 1 (2009): 153–72; Ould Cheikh, “Théologie du désordre,” 67; Warscheid, Droit musulman et société au Sahara prémoderne, 158–63.

63. Felicitas Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law: Islamic Discourse on Legal Change from the 4th/10th to 8th/14th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

64. Kitāb al-bādiya, 212: “zāwiya al-bayt lā budda lahā min suwwar.” For an overview of this system of taxation, see Bonte, L’émirat de l’Adrar mauritanien; As-saʾd, “Émirats et espace émiral maure.”

65. Kitāb al-bādiya, 214.

66. Ibid., 214. Here he recalls a fatwa by Ibn al-Aʿmash on the sharing of charges between the inhabitants of the Ouadane oasis. The same practice can be observed among oasis jurists in the greater Touat in southern Algeria during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Warscheid, Droit musulman et société au Sahara prémoderne, 102–105.

67. Kitāb al-bādiya, 214.

68. Ould Cheikh, “Théologie du désordre,” 64; Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh and Bernard Saison, “Vie(s) et mort(s) de al-Imām al-Ḥaḍrāmī. Autour de la postérité saharienne du mouvement almoravide (11e–17e s.),” Arabica 34, no. 1 (1987): 48–79, here pp. 66–71.

69. Éric Chaumont, “‘God Has Ordained Excellence in All Things; When You Put to Death, Do So after a Decorous Manner’: The Implementation of Mandatory Penalties (al-ḥudūd) in Muslim Law,” in The Quest for a Common Humanity: Human Dignity and Otherness in the Religious Traditions of the Mediterranean, ed. Katell Berthelot and Matthias Morgenstern (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 327–47; Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law, 349–420 and 421–33; Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

70. Robert Gleave, “Public Violence, State Legitimacy: The Iqāmat al-ḥudūd and the Sacred State,” in Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline, and the Construction of the Public Sphere, 7th–19th Centuries CE, ed. Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 256–75.

71. Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law, 189–218, presents an excellent analysis of this differentiation based on the case of the Hanafite school.

72. Sarah Eltantawi, Shariʿah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

73. Kitāb al-bādiya, 177. Regrettably, it has not been possible to localize Jawluma.

74. Ibid., 177.

75. Ibid., 218.

76. Ibid., 175.

77. Leslie P. Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 208.

78. Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law, 172–88. For example, the validity of a contract was not affected by the moral standing of the parties, whether deemed “pious” (ṣāliḥ) or “debauched” (fāsiq). The only question that mattered was whether the transaction was in conformity with the norms of the juridical school, and whether the parties possessed full juridical capacity. In contrast, certain acts such as pillage or the abuse of power could entail both ethical-moral condemnation and a loss of legal capacity; since the ḥassān warrior groups were the principal targets of these measures, this jurisprudential topic is prominent in the collections of western Saharan fatwas. See Oßwald, Schichtengesellschaft und Islamisches Recht.

79. Kitāb al-bādiya, 175.

80. Ibid., 176. See Jacques Berque, Al-Yousi. Problèmes de la culture marocaine au xviie siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1958).

81. Kitāb al-bādiya, 177.

82. Ibid., 223.

83. Éric Chaumont, “La notion de ʿawra selon Abû l-Ḥasan ʿAlî b. Muḥammad b. al-Qaṭṭān al-Fâsî (m. 628/1231),” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 113/114 (2006): 109–23, here p. 113: “A person’s ʿawra refers in a general way to the parts of the body that cannot be uncovered, and cannot be allowed to be seen, and on which another person cannot gaze.” See also Baber Johansen, “The Valorization of the Human Body in Muslim Sunni Law,” in Law and Society in Islam, ed. Devin J. Stewart, Baber Johansen, and Amy Singer (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1996), 71–112.

84. Kitāb al-bādiya, 219.

85. Oßwald, Schichtengesellschaft und Islamisches Recht.

86. Kitāb al-bādiya, 219.

87. Ibid., 220. On the institution of the muḥtasib, see Kristen Stilt, Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experiences in Mamluk Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

88. Kitāb al-bādiya, 220: “al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-nahī ʿan al-munkar.” See Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

89. Kitāb al-bādiya, 220.

90. Gustave E. Von Grunebaum, Modern Islam: The Search for Cultural Identity (Berkley: University of California Press, 1962), 45: “And, moreover, the success of the ‘mediaeval’ period did not last too long. By the eighteenth century Muslim society everywhere, and in every area of endeavor, was in serious decline.” Similar citations can be found in recent publications. See, for instance, Dan Diner, Lost in the Sacred: Why the Muslim World Stood Still [2005], trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

91. Ismail Warscheid, “The Persisting Spectre of Cultural Decline: Historiographical Approaches to Muslim Scholarship in the Early Modern Maghreb,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60, no. 1/2 (2017): 142–73.

92. For a critical view on this Arabocentrism, see Shahzad Bashir, “On Islamic Time: Rethinking Chronology in the Historiography of Muslim Societies,” History and Theory 53, no. 4 (2014): 519–44.

93. For other uses of the “Republic of Letters” in the field of Arabo-Islamic studies, see Muhsin J. al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015); İlker Evrim Binbas, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Saraf al-Dīn ʿAli Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). On the networks of scholars in the early modern and modern Sahara and Maghreb, see Augustin Jomier, “Les réseaux étendus d’un archipel saharien. Les circulations de lettrés ibadites (xviie–années 1950),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 63, no. 2 (2016): 14–39; Stefan Reichmuth, “Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (1732–91) and the Africans: Islamic Discourse and Scholarly Networks in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Reese, The Transmission of Learning, 121–53; Charles C. Stewart, “Southern Saharan Scholarship and the Bilād al-Sūdān,” Journal of African History 15, no. 1 (1976): 73–93; Warscheid, Droit musulman et société au Sahara prémoderne, 28–57.

94. Rainer Oßwald, Sklavenhandel und Sklavenleben zwischen Senegal und Atlas (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016).