By Léon Buskens[1]
Changes in the physical appearance of legal documents from twentieth-century Morocco offer important clues to reconstruct a "biography" of their social life.[2] Their appearance in the souvenir market in Morocco from the end of the twentieth century onward makes it possible for researchers to study these materials, but it is also, in itself, another significant part of their history to be considered. This contribution is based on a corpus of several hundred late nineteenth- and twentieth- century legal documents from bigger cities, such as Tétouan, Fes, Meknes, Rabat and Marrakech, and from rural South Morocco, assembled through the curio trade, currently held in a private collection. I will offer some ideas about how to unwrap the history of these documents through a close "reading" of changes in their materiality. The biographies of the individual documents share many similarities that point to changes in the lives of the people who were writing, reading, and above all keeping these objects, and in the larger legal, economic and political framework.
The societies of the Islamic West, the Maghrib and al-Andalus, share a millennial tradition—solidly anchored in local legal scholarship[3]—in which professional witnesses (ʿudūl, s. ʿadl) wrote legal documents (wathā'iq, s. wathīqa) under the supervision of judges. During the French protectorate (1912–1956), the colonial authorities exercised increasing control over the work of Islamic and Jewish judges and professional witnesses by creating new formalities and imposing requirements for registration and taxation.[4] These measures resulted in the gradual incorporation of these institutions in a pluralistic state legal system.[5] Processes of integration and unification became stronger after Moroccan independence through the imposition of new legislation.[6] This gradual incorporation of Islamic legal institutions into a national state legal system is clearly visible via physical traces in the legal documents under study.
Upon first inspection of the different local collections that together constitute the corpus under study here, we immediately note that the documents appear mostly folded or rolled up. Often, a scribe has noted an indication of the contents on the outer fold, such as "marriage deed." Once we start to unfold them, we often find a series of documents glued together on different sheets of paper, as in the case of the transmission of the property of a house in the city of Meknes.[7] The first document of this series is dated 4 Shaʿbān 1332 AH / 27 June 1914 CE, while the last stems from 1948. When we oversee the series of documents glued together into one folded "scroll," we notice a series of remarkable changes in its physical appearance. The quality of the paper changes through time, and later sheets have an embossed or printed tax stamp. Until rather recently, professional witnesses might opt for vellum to write rather prestigious legal documents, e.g., those related to real estate transfers or marriages in prominent families.[8] In southern Morocco, wood—in the form of sticks or wooden slabs—was also quite current until the first half of the twentieth century.[9]
Looking closer at the individual documents, we can observe that the writing itself is quite peculiar. The ductus of the professional witnesses is notoriously difficult to read. Occasionally, gifted calligraphers produced beautiful documents with important elements in a different style, and with the use of colored ink, silver and gold. These achievements were mostly reserved for marriage deeds for the daughters of prominent families.[10] Until the beginning of the last century, witnesses wrote with a reed pen and locally produced ink.[11] As later documents in our corpus show, gradually their letters became thinner, indicating the use of steel nibs and industrially produced ink. Finally, we observe that ballpoints took over. Late twentieth-century documents were written with typewriters, and nowadays the word processor makes work easier. The computer fits well with the formulaic character of the texts; it suffices to fill out the proper names and other specifics in a standardized model. The use of typewriters and printers enables ordinary people to read the documents with greater ease, although the language remains legalese, as it consists of phrases taken from formularies—scholarly books of models to create a legally effective text.
As the entire corpus of documents on vellum and paper shows, through time the general layout of the documents has remained rather identical: the right side offers a wide margin, whereas on the left side, no empty space remains.[12] These scribal practices are intertwined with doctrinal rules: the absence of a left margin ideally prevents any tampering with the contents of the deed through additional insertions. For similar reasons, any correction or erasure in the text is strictly forbidden. The right margin offers space for later references, for example to registers kept at the court to which the professional witnesses were attached. The French protectorate administration increasingly imposed the keeping of registers by professional witnesses, which contained both the notes on which the ʿudūl would base their final document and the copies that they became obliged to produce and keep.[13] Until then, a deed only existed as an original kept by the entitled party.
Documents from the 1920s and 1930s in our corpus show that the scribes put stamps indicating the name of the court at the top of the document. Documents attached later attest to the introduction of pre-printed forms, including rubrics to refer to the registers in which the writers would have copied the document. The obligation to pay tax dues accompanied the procedure of registering real estate transactions with the protectorate authorities. As we can see in the collection under study, these tax measures took the form of affixing a stamp or professional witnesses using paper with an embossed or printed tax stamp to write down their documents (see image below). On wooden documents from southern Morocco, we find stamps for "Bureau d'affaires indigenes / Contrôle des Actes," indicating the control of the colonial administration, which conferred additional legal force.[14]
Following the date at the end of the document, the professional witnesses, who should always operate in pairs in compliance with the rules of classical Islamic law,[15] would put their signature (shakl) in a graphic form, also known as khunfūsa ("scarab"). The judge who oversaw the work of the professional witnesses and officially acknowledged their integrity (ʿadāla) would then add a formula that rendered the document legally valid (khitāb), complemented by his signature.[16] In the course of time, the corpus shows stamps occurring at the end of the document, both for the formula and the judge's seal.
In the past, considerable differences in the manners of storing and keeping the documents existed. During my fieldwork in Morocco, I have encountered various forms of wooden boxes of different sizes, but also metal containers made of bent tin sheet. In southern Morocco, the use of bamboo tubes in which rolled up or pleated documents were inserted was quite widespread. The owners of the legal documents would keep their means of proof in baskets or earthenware pots, safely stored with other valuables and reserves in the often huge, fortified communal warehouse known as an agadir.[17]
A remarkable aspect of the materiality of these Moroccan legal documents is their availability to foreign researchers. Their main function was to exist, that is, to remain available so that the people directly concerned with their contents as owners, heirs, or partners could resort to them as instruments of proof if trouble arose. In most cases, people did not need to take their papers out of storage; in legal anthropology terms, these were "troubleless cases."[18] Early in my fieldwork in Morocco, I learned how reluctant people might be to show documents to an outsider, as disclosure was a potential source of trouble and therefore dangerous. The documents that turn up in the curio market in Morocco are to a large extent discards—waste for which people have no other use or interest than to sell them as souvenirs to outsiders.[19] Recently, a Moroccan dealer and an American collector published a report on their exploration of deserted villages in southern Morocco in which they encountered huge collections of left-behind documents.[20] From a historian's point of view, the danger the authors of this article might cause is that enterprising peddlers will sell these documents on the tourist market as curios, thus detaching immensely important sources for history from their local context. It is sad to realize that the most important elements for understanding these documents have already been lost: the people who wrote, read, and kept them, and who had all the local knowledge to properly understand them.[21]
Often, scholars focus on the text of a legal document as a source for local and legal history. I plea to also take the physical traces of their life into account, since they offer important clues about how these small facts relate to major changes at a local and a national level. The marginal references and stamps, but also the paper, ink, and writing materials used, all indicate a gradual incorporation of local communities into the larger structures of a state and an economy that was increasingly centrally administered. This meant the imposition of new legal procedures and new taxes. It also entailed a new understanding of the legal framework, with a transition from the flexibility of Islamic jurisprudence to the uniformity of state law laid down in legislation.[22]
Notes:
[1] For anything that I write about legal documents in Morocco, my debt to the late Si Mostapha Naji (1951–2000) is immense. I remember our numerous exchanges with great fondness and owe my access to the corpus under study to him.
[2] Of course, I refer here to the notion introduced by Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–92.
[3] For a general introduction to professional witnesses and their documents in Morocco and further references, see Léon Buskens, "Writers and Keepers: Notes on the Culture of Legal Documents in Morocco," in The Vellum Contract Documents in Morocco in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries Part II, ed. Toru Miura and Kentaro Sato (The Toyo Bunko, 2020), 98–125. For a short history of the making of the modern Moroccan legal system, see Léon Buskens, "Sharia and National Law in Morocco," in Sharia Incorporated: A Comparative Overview of the Legal Systems of Twelve Muslim Countries in Past and Present, ed. Jan Michiel Otto (Leiden University Press, 2010), 89–138.
[4] Léon Buskens, Islamitisch recht en familiebetrekkingen in Marokko (Bulaaq, 1999), 216–23.
[5] Buskens, Islamitisch recht, 216–33.
[6] For an overview of legal rules on professional witnesses and legal documents in Morocco from the French protectorate until 1999, see Buskens, Islamitisch recht, 216–296. Law no. 16.03 came into effect in 2008, while a new law has been in the making since 2023. See "Profession d'adoul: Modification de conditions d'accès," CGEM, February 2, 2023, accessed January 14, 2026, https://cgem.ma/activites/profession-dadoul-modification-de-conditions-dacces/. Minister of Justice Ouahbi announced a new law, no. 16.22, on 7 January 2026 ("Le projet de loi relatif aux adouls vise à renforcer les fondements de la profession, selon Ouahbi," TelQuel, January 8, 2026, accessed January 14, 2026, https://telquel.ma/instant-t/2026/01/08/le-projet-de-loi-relatif-aux-adouls-vise-a-renforcer-les-fondements-de-la-profession-selon-ouahbi_1969208/). On 22 January 2018, King Mohammed VI ordered a new interpretation of Article 4 of the 2008 law that allows women to become professional witnesses, a major change compared to previous practice ("Le Maroc autorise les femmes à exercer le métier de notaire de droit musulman," Le Monde, January 23, 2018). In 2020, the new cohort of forty-five professional witnesses included, for the first time, eighteen women (Zoubida Senoussi, "18 femmes adouls de la promotion 2018 prêtent serment, une première au Maroc," Hespress 2 July 2020, https://fr.hespress.com/153857-18-femmes-adouls-de-la-promotion-2018-pretent-serment-une-premiere-au-maroc.html).
[7] Privately held document, part of the corpus under study, a fragment of which is illustrated in this contribution.
[8] Toru Miura and Kentaro Sato, The Vellum Contract Documents in Morocco in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries (The Toyo Bunko, 2015 and 2020).
[9] Hamza Elbahraoui and Igor Kliakhandler, "Discovery of a Vast Corpus of Berber Arraten Documents," The Journal of North African Studies 29 (2024): 1052–73.
[10] Buskens, Islamitisch recht, ii, reproduces an example of such a lavishly produced marriage deed from 1333/1915, still preserved by the descendants of the couple, a family of craftsmen in the city of Salé.
[11] On the history of writing culture and writing materials in Morocco, see Muḥammad al-Mannūnī, Taʾrīkh al-wirāqa al-maghribīya: Ṣināʿat al-makhṭūṭ al-maghribī min al-ʿaṣr al-wasīṭ ilā al-fitra al-muʿāṣira (Manshūrāt Kullīyat al-Ādāb wa'l-ʿUlūm al-Insānīya bil-Ribāṭ, 1991).
[12] For a study of a corpus of eight documents on vellum from Fes, see Kentaro Sato, "Form and Use of the Vellum Documents," in The Vellum Contract Documents in Morocco in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries, Part I, ed. Toru Miura and Kentaro Sato (The Toyo Bunko, 2015), 8–22.
[13] Buskens, Islamitisch recht, 219.
[14] Several examples in a collection of legal documents on wood from Southern Morocco, part of the corpus under study, privately held.
[15] Buskens, "Writers and Keepers," 100–1.
[16] Buskens, Islamitisch recht, 262–77.
[17] For an illustration, see Ivo Grammet and Min De Meersman eds, Splendeurs du Maroc (Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale, 1998), 62.
[18] J.F. Holleman, "Trouble-Cases and Trouble-Less Cases in the Study of Customary Law and Legal Reform," Law & Society Review 7 (1973): 585–609.
[19] Léon Buskens, "From Trash to Treasure. Ethnographic Notes on Collecting Legal Documents in Morocco," in Legal Documents as Sources for the History of Muslim Societies. Studies in Honour of Rudolf Peters, ed. Maaike van Berkel et al (Brill, 2017), 180–207.
[20] Elbahraoui and Kliakhandler, "Discovery of a Vast Corpus of Berber Arraten Documents." For a description of a private collection of wooden documents from South Morocco, see Jan Just Witkam, What about these Scholars, Poets and Prophets? A Few Finishing Touches (Ter Lugt Press, 2025), 77–91; on 90–1, Witkam discusses the production of counterfeits for the tourist trade.
[21] For such a contextualized approach, see the exemplary monograph by the regretted Brinkley Messick, Sharî'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology (Columbia University Press, 2018), especially 321–403.
[22] Léon Buskens, "Sharia and the Colonial State," in The Ashgate Research Companion to Islamic Law, ed. Rudolph Peters and Peri Bearman (Ashgate, 2014), 209–21.
Suggested Bluebook citation: Léon Buskens, Material Proof: Some Notes on Legal Documents in Morocco as Physical Objects, Islamic Law Blog (Mar. 5, 2026), https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/03/05/roundtable-material-proof-some-notes-on-legal-documents-in-morocco-as-physical-objects/.
Suggested Chicago citation: Léon Buskens, "Material Proof: Some Notes on Legal Documents in Morocco as Physical Objects," Islamic Law Blog, March 5, 2026, https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/03/05/roundtable-material-proof-some-notes-on-legal-documents-in-morocco-as-physical-objects/.
