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

an injustice or an act of oppression. The maẓālim courts were audiences during which the ruling
authorities (either the caliph or sultan himself, or one of his designated ministers) heard
complaints from subjects on a range of matters. The functioning of maẓālim courts was
theorized most famously by ‘Alī b. Muḥammad al-Māwardī (d. 1058) in his al-Aḥkām al-
sulṭānīya. 56 However, scholars have convincingly argued that al-Māwardī’s theories were
largely descriptive of an ideal which was not always realized in the actual functioning of these
courts. 57 Rather, the term maẓālim covers a broad range of ways in which states responded to
the obligation to ensure justice by opening avenues of direct appeal to the highest authority. I am
thus not particularly interested in seeing to what extent the Moroccan Ministry of Complaints
matched up with al-Māwardī’s ideal type, since it is clear that each state organized maẓālim
courts quite differently. 58 Yet in invoking the term maẓālim, Morocco’s administrators
undoubtedly had the history of this institution in mind, though probably in its more general sense
of “the personal intervention of the sovereign (or his vizier).” 59
Nonetheless, there is no question that the kind of justice dispensed in maẓālim courts—as
well as by the Ministry of Complaints—was quite different from that of the qāḍīs. Whereas
which describes the existence of a localized divan-ı hümayun which heard şikayet for the province of Rumelia. On
dhimmīs’ use of the Ottoman divan-ı hümayun, see Wittmann, “Before Qadi and Vizier,” Chapters 2 and 3.
Although the divan-ı hümayun dwindled into insignificance in the eighteenth century (Bernard Lewis, “Dīwān-i
Humāyūn,” in Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. P. Bearman, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2003)), the central government continued
to receive and address petitions until the dissolution of the empire: see Yuval Ben-Bassat, “In Search of Justice:
Petitions Sent from Palestine to Istanbul from the 1870’s Onwards,” Turcica 41 (2009); idem, “‘Al ṭelegraf vetzedeq
: ha-petitziot shel toshavei Yafo ve-‘Azah le-vazir ha-gadol be-Istanbul,” Ha-Mizraḥ he-Ḥadash 49 (2010);
Nora Lafi, “Petitions and Accommodating Urban Change in the Ottoman Empire,” in Istanbul as seen from a
distance: Centre and Provinces in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga, M. Sait Özervarlı, and Feryal Tansuğ
(Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute, 2011).
56
For a summary of al-Māwardī’s theory of maẓālim courts, see Amedroz, “The Maẓālim Jurisdiction.”
57
See especially Nielsen, Secular Justice in an Islamic State, 17, 31. See also Wittmann, “Before Qadi and Vizier,”
141.
58
Mohamed Lahbabi is particularly concerned with comparing the Moroccan Ministry of Complaints to al-Māwardī,
which is perhaps why he draws the rather strange and misleading conclusions that he does (in particular that the
Ministry of Complaints did not serve a judicial role at all and was strictly administrative): see Lahbabi, Le
gouvernement marocain, 177. It is also possible that Lahbabi simply did not have access to the same registers which
I examined; although he refers to the “Archives du ministère” he does not cite any sources.
59
Stern, “Three Petitions of the Fatimid Period,” 187.
167