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

of these institutions remain opaque. The importance of the present study, then, lies partly in its
use of archival documents to reconstruct the functioning of Moroccan legal institutions.
In addition to undertaking the first institutional history of courts in pre-colonial North
Africa, this dissertation also suggests new directions for the study of law in the Islamic
Mediterranean. The historiographical context in which I intervene is that of Ottoman history,
where historians interested in law have been drawing on archival sources for decades. Whereas
the first studies based on Ottoman sharī‘a court records mined them for details about quotidian
life and social history, 21 historians soon became interested in law itself and began drawing on the
Ottoman archives to reconstruct the functioning of sharī‘a courts. 22 Yet interest in the
functioning of law itself—rather than using legal sources to write social history—has translated
into a focus on institutional history which largely ignores the experiences of legal actors. 23 My
approach instead examines how individuals engaged with Moroccan legal institutions and made
decisions about which legal forums to use and when. This does not mean that I ignore the
institutional history of courts in Morocco, nor that I am uninterested in the ways in which these
courts interacted with the central government; on the contrary, these are both topics which I
21
See esp. André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIème siècle, 2 vols. (Damascus: Institut
français de Damas, 1973).
22
See, e.g., Ronald C. Jennings, “Kadi, Court, and Legal Procedure in 17th C. Ottoman Kayseri: The Kadi and the
Legal System,” Studia Islamica 48 (1978); idem, “Limitations of the Judicial Powers of the Kadi in 17th C. Ottoman
Kayseri,” Studia Islamica 50 (1979); Haim Gerber, “Sharia, Kanun and Custom in the Ottoman Law: The Court
Records of 17th Century Bursa,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 2, no. 1 (1981). The relationship between
sharī‘a courts and the central government has constituted a particularly fruitful field of inquiry; Leslie Peirce’s work,
for instance, shows how sharī‘a courts played a central role in the process of Ottomanization during the sixteenth
century: Peirce, Morality Tales.
23
In recent years, there has been fruitful attention to the culture of Ottoman courts and an effort to situate the
archival records in the historical context in which they were created. See esp. Dror Ze’evi, "The Use of Ottoman
Sharī‘a Court Records as a Source for Middle Eastern Social History: A Reappraisal," Islamic Law and Society 5,
no. 1 (1998); Iris Agmon, “Recording Procedures and Legal Culture in the Late Ottoman Shari‘a Court of Jaffa,”
Islamic Law and Society 11, no. 3 (2004); idem, Family and Court, esp. Chapter 3. Boğaç Ergene is one of the few
scholars to call for more attention to the perspective of legal actors: Boğaç Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society
and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652-1744)
(Leiden: Brill, 2003). Ultimately, however, Ergene’s most powerful arguments concern the nature of the courts,
rather than the experience of individuals (see, e.g., Chapters 3, 4, and 5).
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