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

officials saw their intervention on behalf of foreign nationals and protected persons as a useful
tool with which to increase their influence in Morocco. The Makhzan, on the other hand,
became increasingly concerned about the threat to its authority posed by the growing ranks of
protégés. This conflict came to something of a head during the Madrid Conference of 1880,
when representatives of eleven foreign nations and the Makhzan’s minister of foreign affairs
convened with the stated goal of preventing abuses of protection. 20 Despite the adoption of a
new treaty regulating diplomatic relations and the nature of extraterritoriality in Morocco, the
status quo hardly shifted. 21 The Makhzan continued to protest the abuses of protection until
colonization in 1912.
The fact that so many Moroccan Muslims acquired patents of protection made the
protégé system in Morocco distinct. In the Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of protégés were
non-Muslims. 22 This is part of what leads Timur Kuran to argue that Muslims could not reap the
advantages of forum shopping in consular courts, since for Muslims to acquire foreign protection
would have signaled “a radical challenge to the Islamic legal system, which required them to live
by Islamic law.” 23 In Morocco, some jurists argued that Muslims who acquired patents of
protection were in violation of Islamic law. 24 Yet these protests this did not stop large numbers
20
On the Madrid Conference, see Bowie, “The Protégé System in Morocco”; Parsons, The Origins of the Morocco
Question; Kenbib, Les protégés, 57-66. The eleven nations represented include: Austria-Hungary, Belgium,
Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden-Norway, and the United States
(ibid., 59).
21
As evidenced by calls for a second Madrid Conference as soon as 1887: see Frederick V. Parsons, “The Proposed
Madrid Conference on Morocco, 1887-88,” Historical Journal 8, no. 1 (1965).
22
In fact, historiographical discussions of protection in the Ottoman Empire tend to describe all protégés as being
non-Muslim (see Salahi R. Sonyel, “The Protégé System in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Islamic Studies 2, no.
1 (1991); Van Den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System). Yet it seems to me unlikely that
there were absolutely no Ottoman Muslims who acquired foreign protection (I am thinking in particular of guards
and other employees of consulates), even if most protégés were non-Muslims.
23
Kuran, The Long Divergence, 204.
24
On the opposition of ‘ulamā’ to protection, see Ja‘far b. Idrīs al-Kattānī, Al-Dawāhī al-madhiyya li-’l-firaq almaḥmiyya
: fī al-walā’ wa-’l-barā’ (Amman: Dār al-Bayāriq, 1998); Laroui, Origines, 315-17; al-Manūnī, Maẓāhir,
276