IN THE COURTS OF THE NATIONS - DataSpace - Princeton ...

gathered twelve men who testified that they personally knew he was poor, owned nothing, was
destitute, etc. 150 The qāḍī might then order the defendant to provide a copy of this proof (that is,
of the lafīf document itself) to the plaintiff. 151 At this point, the creditor had little choice but to
request that his destitute debtor be imprisoned until he paid, unless he chose to contest the
validity of the lafīf (such as by requesting a fatwā, discussed below). The qāḍī’s role ended at
ordering the destitute debtor to prove he had no money; after this, it was the responsibility of a
Makhzan official to imprison the debtor or otherwise try to extract payment from him.
Having a destitute debtor who acknowledged his debt was in many ways preferable to
facing a debtor who denied owing the debts with which he was charged. In most such cases the
defendants’ arguments for why they did not in fact owe the money claimed by their creditors are
not preserved. 152 Yet in some instances the defendants did specify the reasons behind their
claims. A particularly interesting argument made in four separate lawsuits was that the loan was
usurious. In each of these cases the defendant claimed that the Jewish creditor lent him a certain
amount of money, but drew up a bill of debt for an amount at least twice as large. Significantly,
not one of these lawsuits used the word ribā, the classical term for usury in Islamic
jurisprudence. For instance, on November 3, 1891, Ya‘aqov sued Aḥmad b. al-Ḥājj Mubārak al-
Sharādī al-Dalīmī al-Shangilī for 350 riyāls owed to him in three separate bills of debt (for 200,
that the person must both produce witnesses and take an oath to that effect (René Bouvet, De la faillite en droit
musulman (Paris: L. Giard & Brière, 1913), 18).
150
There are twenty-five such lafīf testimonies in the Assarraf collection, most of them testifying to the fact that a
particular person is destitute. Many of these lafīf testimonies, however, are on separate sheets of paper from the
lawsuits to which they related, making it hard to trace exactly how many of the lawsuits in the collection also
produced lafīfs.
151
See, for instance, TC, File #3, 4 Rabī‘ I 1297, in which Shalom sued Bū Shittā b. ‘Abd al-Jalīl al-Qamrī al-
Bashīmī for debts which Bū Shittā had guaranteed (amounting to 2,094 riyāls). Bū Shittā pleaded guilty and
claimed he was destitute. A separate entry from the same day reads: “After a lafīf testified to what was said above
[presumably that Bū Shittā was destitute], the sharī‘a rules that the plaintiff must produce a copy of the proofs with
the intention of investigating (bi-qaṣdi al-baḥthi) within fifteen days from tomorrow.”
152
Some exceptions include TC, File #3, 8 Jumādā II 1320, in which Ya‘aqov accused al-Ḥājj Muḥammad b. Mūsā
al-Zarhūnī al-Musāwī of owing him 240 riyāls. Al-Zarhūnī claimed that he had already paid 95 riyāls of the debt
which, it seems, Ya‘aqov refused to recognize.
107