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

similar to those cases recorded in the Ministry of Complaints registers). 53 Questions of personal
status (such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance) almost never came before consular courts,
although there are a few exceptions which prove the rule. 54
The regulations that governed cases involving protégés were fairly straightforward.
However, confusion about the rules and deliberate rule-breaking often made cases more
complicated than they might otherwise have been. The simplest cases were those involving
subjects or protégés of the same state, which were adjudicated by the consul of the country
concerned. Yet most cases involved subjects or protégés of different states, which meant that the
jurisdiction of the case was decided by the nationality of the defendant (after 1856). 55 Moreover,
there were instances in which consuls agreed to overlook jurisdictional guidelines, for example
by trying cases involving a defendant who was a protégé in a Makhzan or sharī‘a court. 56
For the British, and later the French as well, a plaintiff with foreign nationality or
protection could not press charges directly, either at a consulate if the defendant was a protégé or
in a sharī‘a or Makhzan court if the defendant was a Moroccan subject. Rather, British subjects
53
In addition to theft and murder cases, other criminal charges either brought by or made against protégés and
foreigners also surface in the consular archives. See, e.g., FO, 631/1, p. 26b, 25 August 1832 (in which the qā’id of
Tetuan imprisoned and gave 200 lashes to a Moroccan Jew who was accused of insulting a British subject, also a
Jew).
54
See, e.g., FO, 174/221, p. 67, 18 March 1850 (the registration of the marriage of Judah Leon and Hamaa
Benzaquen in the chancellery of the British consulat); FO, 631/2, p. 107b-108a, 1868 (a marriage solemnized at the
British vice consulate between Job Jean Dahan and Rahma Nahon); USNA, Reg. 84, v. 001, 22 November 1864
(which concerns an order by the American vice-consul in Essaouira that Meshod Sabah “keep the peace to the
Public and towards his wife….”). Finally, there is some evidence that Muslims used consular courts for personal
status issues: see, e.g., MAE Nantes, Tanger F 2, 20 August 1895 (in which Fathma Asseuaï was granted a divorce
by the French consular court in Tangier).
55
In some instances determining the nationality of the defendant proved challenging, such as in a case from 1876 in
which the umanā’ of Essaouira wanted to press charges against the British agent of a Spanish firm. The British
consul in Essaouira, R. Drummond Hay (John Drummond Hay’s son), reported that he had sent the case to the
Spanish consular court, presumably because the principal on which the British subject was trading belonged to
Spanish subjects (FO, 631/5, R. Drummond Hay to John Drummond Hay, 10 December 1876).
56
See, e.g., FO 636/2, 3 November 1909, p. 38b, in which the British and American consuls in Tetuan agreed to
send a case in which the defendant was an American protégé to a Makhzan court. See also Lambert v. El-Hasnaoui;
Lambert was a French subject suing al-Ḥasnāwī, a British protégé, but the French consul suggested that the matter
should be adjudicated in a sharī‘a court (Caillé, “Un procès consulaire à Mogador,” 339).
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