Law under the Almoravids and What Questions You Can Ask Legal Texts
By Camilo Gómez-Rivas This is the first in a two-part series on Law under the Almoravids. The second essay takes up the development of diplomacy and international negotiation. I came to writing about Almoravid-period legal texts in a circuitous wa…
This is the first in a two-part series on Law under the Almoravids. The second essay takes up the development of diplomacy and international negotiation.
I came to writing about Almoravid-period legal texts in a circuitous way—as I imagine many of us do—in the adventurous struggle that is finding dissertation and first book projects. The Almoravids (Arabic, al-Murābiṭūn 440s/1050s–542/1147) were a religious and political movement centered on a tribal coalition that emerged from the Western Sahara in the middle of the eleventh century and unified what is today Morocco, Mauritania, and Western Algeria. They also established control of al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain, toward the last decade of the eleventh century. In building their state, centered in Marrakech, they performed a series of actions that were foundational for the political and religious institutions of the region. They founded Tlemcen and Marrakech (the city that would lend Morocco its name) and oversaw urban construction projects of lasting effect (in Fez they built new walls unifying two towns into a single city, in Ceuta/Sabta they doubled the size of the mosque). They minted gold dinars, articulated a new formula for political regional and international legitimacy, and shaped and founded the Islamic legal institutions of their region (following the Mālikī madhhab/school). On the whole, the Almoravid period represents a deep shift in the balance and shape of power in the region, echoing shifts in patterns of settlement, urbanization, and commerce in and between western North Africa, the Sahara, and the Western Mediterranean.[1]
The author's book on the subject.
What drove me to write about the Almoravids was a historical question about the role of Maghribīs (and Tamazight and Berber culture in general) in the history of Islamic Spain.[2] In reading about al-Andalus, I had wondered why the emergence of the Almoravids was often narrated as the beginning of the end (political power shifting away from Córdoba to Marrakech), while it is also the moment when signature cultural traditions emerge as mature and recognizably "Andalusī." Vernacular poetry is one example (the mawashshaha and zajal), as is the emergence (even peaking) of sophisticated philosophical and mystical traditions and schools. These take shape in force toward the end of the Almoravid period, which was followed by the appearance of another Marrakech-based dynasty and religious-political movement from Morocco (that of the Almohads), which was equally, if not more, idiosyncratic and powerfully contradictory (the theologies they espoused were practically opposite).[3]
I turned to reading legal sources very much at the prompting of Spanish scholars[4] who maintained that while new historiographical texts were unlikely to emerge (those of the kind we are used to identify most centrally with the genre of history),[5] there were innumerable legal texts that presented a wealth of new historical information. Their edition and close scrutiny was incumbent upon historians looking to say something new about the past of al-Andalus and the Maghrib. It made a lot of sense to try this route out. The texts themselves appeared to present a mixture of "documentary" material preserved from the time of their production (in actual fact, extremely rare for this period), with more transmitted material (texts that were compiled and transmitted for reference by later generations). Understanding the nature of this transmission (why and how these texts were transmitted and studied) was, therefore, equally incumbent upon the historian, in order to read the texts with any historical veracity.
I had a set of historical questions and seemed to have found a set of sources. The main task ahead would be to find how to put them together. This proved very challenging and brings me to the two points I want to underscore here. First, that deep knowledge of legal reasoning and procedure allows for detailed and sophisticated analysis and close readings of such texts and the reconstruction of their intellectual and social contexts. And second, that non legal readings of such texts are not only viable but vital for us to think through a whole range of issues about society and culture. Put more plainly, while much of the academic discussion of such texts focuses on their place in legal-history (and while much of the positive knowledge derived from such texts hinges on its location in legal history) still, non-legal readings (or ones uninterested in answering legal historical questions) have the ability to connect legal texts to wider discursive fields and aspects of culture, with which the text is deeply and multiply connected.
One thing you're confronted with when writing is that readers expect certain kinds of readings and certain kinds of questions from certain kinds of texts: i.e., that legal texts answer legal questions and that what we can know from them, as serious scholars, are answers to legal questions.[6] I want to argue that legal texts are literary texts as well as social texts and that while they can be situated within intellectual histories and legal histories, they can also be read with other questions in mind. I don't think this should be done by entirely ignoring the legal history (that would seem perilous). However, because the legal texts belong to a broader literary universe, their interpretation can provide surprising insights with deeper meanings.
All of this is easier said than done.
As I write this I am struck by the parallel with literary history, in which the tracing of influence through proof texts was for so long the gold standard of scholarly investigation, and thus, the search and argument for "the Arabic influence" in Romance poetry suffered from the absence of a "smoking gun."[7] (I don't know how anyone could read the Libro de Buen Amor and not see proof...).[8] Any wider scope or "thick" reading of the cultural situation, informed by multiple media and genre, would seem to loudly bespeak such influence. The architecture, the decoration, the textiles, the music, the philosophy... Of course the poetic traditions were influenced, just in a different way than that strictly conceived by nineteenth century European philology.
Reading legal texts from the Almoravid period and reconstructing the cases that produced them poses a similar challenge to finding proof of Arabic influence in medieval Romance poetics. The legal topics and questions don't appear ground changing. At the same time, and after much thought, the fact that an entire founding generation of Mālikī legal practitioners and scholars appear in a region (Morocco) where they had not existed in such numbers is the story.[9] This one generation of Mālikī scholars leaves a "paper" trail of juristic activity, asking all kinds of questions. They also wrote the first regional "history'" of the institution (in the form of a biographical dictionary).[10] The historical development worth highlighting, then, is the appearance of this network, of the multiple activity recorded, including questions touching on legal education and appropriate texts for study,[11] of the vast increase in scholarly exchange with neighboring regions with longer traditions of scholarship, and of the recorded direct patronage of the amīr of the Almoravids to develop this new network. The multiple legal questions brought up by this paper trail richly illustrate the social dynamics involved in the development of this institutional and administrative network. It's not a direct documentary recording and shouldn't be read as such (as with all sources from earlier periods such as the "middle ages," sources have to be read carefully and often "against the grain"). They constitute exiguous and distorted evidence for wider processes taking place and are often (always?) only left to us because of how they were read and valorized by later generations, which shaped the evidence preserved and the tradition received.[12]
Qubbat al-Baʿdiyyīn, the fountain in the ablutions court of the great mosque commissioned by ʿAlī b. Yūsuf, one of the few remaining Almoravid structures in Marrakesh. Interior and exterior (both photographs taken by author).
Something I see very clearly in this particular paper trail is the development of what I think of as state spaces or state-mediated spaces, coming into contact through legal discourse with non-state spaces, both horizontally and vertically, i.e., towards the borders of the state, in diplomatic and commercial exchange beyond its borders, and within, in the gradual adoption of Islamic (and Mālikī) social, ritual, and more strictly "legal" practice in the growing cities, towns, and countryside. The many cases that we have, over the specific amounts involved in a commercial dispute meriting the need for oath taking at the congregational mosque, or allotting water use for agriculture and industry, or ritual questions on the technicalities of performing ablutions or ritual prayer, all richly illustrate this process. And it's not that they trace the introduction of Islamic practice. Rather, and more likely, they signal a broad increase in the use of Islamic legal discourse to mediate, negotiate, and arbitrate a series of social activities and functions, including commercial disputes and social contracts.
Notes:
[1] I have recently written a short history of the Almoravids touching on these points. Camilo Gómez-Rivas, The Almoravid Maghrib (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2023), 65–85.
[3] It would be fair to parse this a bit more and say that philosophical thought developed dramatically in the ṭāʾifa period (1009-1091) while the mystical and theosophical traditions are more of the Almoravid period. The point remains, of the mystery of their flourishing, after the "golden age" of political unity. Umayyad Córdoba (756-1009) is seen as the high-point of political unity and (for this reason) often described as the golden age of Islamic Spain. A civil war that broke out after 1008 destroyed the caliphate, which was replaced by city states, the ṭāʾifa kingdoms, who in turn were conquered by the Marrakesh-based Almoravids in the late eleventh century.
[4] I followed in the footsteps of scholars like Maribel Fierro and (about the Almoravids more specifically) Delfina Serrano. Vincent Lagardère's work was also an important foundation. There are many others, but these are a good examples of the "legal turn" in writing the social and cultural history of al-Andalus.
[5]I think it's safe to say that the "chronicle" or the Arab-Islamic version of such a book, is not necessarily the dominant historiographical form in the Islamic Maghrib and in the Islamic world more broadly. There are a wealth of other historiographical texts of equal import and affording different points of view. I only came to realize this later.
[6] This is the case with subject matter too, it turns out. Readers bring expectations to certain subjects. To a discussion of al-Andalus, for example, it is often, "Why does this matter to the history of Europe and the West," which is one of the ideas that is used to valorize the history of al-Andalus, i.e., how "the Arabs" gave "us" science and philosophy and are, therefore, worth talking about.
[8] Arcipreste de Hita, Libro de buen amor, ed. G. B. Gybbon Monypenny (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1988). Sometimes referred to as the "most surprising work of medieval Spanish literature," the Libro is a wonderful and strange fourteenth century poetic work with echoes of the maqāmah and which powerfully gestures to its own hybridity.
[9] See Camilo Gómez-Rivas, Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib, SHSM Vol. 6, (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 39–42.
[11] Ibn Rushd al-Jadd answers, for example, a question sent by jurists from Marrakesh, seeking to resolve a contradiction within their reference texts:
Concerning a ḥadīth in the chapter of belief in divorce in the Mudawwana, on the authority of Abū Zinād and Ibn Shihāb, concerning the testimony of three men regarding another man's divorce pronouncement. One testifies to the fact that the man has pronounced the repudiation three times, another twice, and yet another once, the last thereby omitting two previous divorce pronouncements (taṭlīqatayn). In another copy (nuskha) of the Mudawwana, however, the men testify to the man's divorcing separately: one testifies that he has repudiated his wife once, another says he has done so twice, and another three times. As a result, it is accepted that he has accumulated only two pronouncements of divorce.
Such a question can be imagined to stem from a real event. It is perhaps more likely, however, that it arose in the process of studying and teaching the texts. This doesn't detract from the historical importance of the question and institutional development—through legal education—it illustrates. Gómez-Rivas, Law and the Islamization of Morocco, 70–73; 158–60. Ibn Rushd al-Jadd, Fatāwā Ibn Rushd: li-Abī al-Walīd Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Aḥmad b. Rushd al-Qurṭubī al-Mālikī, ed. al-Mukhtār b. al-Ṭāhir al-Talīlī (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al_Islamī, 1987), 1027–29.
[12]For which knowledge of the legal history can be a crucial tool.
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