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

were required to notify their consular authorities, who would in turn initiate legal proceedings. 57
This meant that if a British protégé wanted to bring a lawsuit against a Moroccan subject, he
could not go directly to the qā’id or qāḍī; rather, he had to go through the nearest British consul,
who would write to the appropriate Moroccan legal authority. 58 In 1872 Accan Levy, an
interpreter at the British consulate in Essaouira, was dismissed from his post for violating just
this rule. British subjects and protégés bribed Levy to take their legal cases directly to the
Moroccan authorities, bypassing the British consul entirely. 59
In 1879, Mawlāy Ḥasan made this procedure standard for all of Morocco, ruling that
foreign subjects and protégés must go through their consular representatives in order to bring
cases before Moroccan legal authorities. 60 While the foreign consuls nominally accepted this
new rule, it was not consistently followed. 61 French subjects and protégés in particular tended to
apply directly to the competent Moroccan court. Only if their initial efforts failed did they apply
to their consul, who would then intervene with the local Makhzan official or the qāḍī. 62 For
instance, in 1884, Ḥaim Herkoz, a French protégé, wrote to Ordega, the French ambassador to
Morocco. 63 Herkoz explained that he was robbed while staying in a duwār (a small village) in
the Dukkāla region. He initially appealed to the local qā’id for compensation; when that was
unsuccessful, he wrote directly to the sultan. After he had tried and failed to resolve his case
57 For an explanation of this rule, see, e.g., FO 631/7, p. 3b-4a, 21 April 1879.
58 In some cases, the requirement of going through one’s consular official extended even to informal resolutions
among parties. See, for instance, DAR, Ḥimāyāt, Mūsā b. Aḥmad to ‘Abdallāh b. Aḥmad, 14 Rabī‘ I 1295, in which
Mūsā explained that a Jewish protégé (he does not specify of which state) and his Muslim associate had settled a
legal dispute out of court, but that the Jew insisted that he had to get the permission of his consul (who was
temporarily absent) before they signed the agreement.
59 FO, 635/4, Public Acts, Mogador, p. 32a-b, 11 April 1872. This episode is discussed further in Chapter Eight.
60 See, e.g., Mawlāy Ḥasan to Muḥammad Bargāsh, 10 Rabī‘ I 1296, in Mūdirīyat al-Wathā’iq al-Mālikīya, Al-
Wathā’iq, v. 4, 452-3.
61 See John Drummond Hay to Marquis of Salisbury, 31 March 1879 (in idem, Al-Wathā’iq, Volume 5 (Rabat: al-
Maṭba‘a al-mālikīya, 1981), 188-9).
62 Although this is the procedure which I surmised from reading the French consular archives, I have yet to find
explicit instructions outlining these rules.
63 MAE Nantes, Tanger A 161, Herkoz to Ordega, 18 August 1884.
285