The Strait of Gibraltar is a ubiquitous symbol of the supposed dividing line between Europe and the Muslim world. This book re-evaluates that perception with reference to new archival evidence about the links between the Gharb region of Morocco and Gibraltar and the establishment of the Moroccan consulate there, focusing on the period around 1750-1850. It shows the development of a complex set of political, social and economic relationships across the strait that connected Morocco to Gibraltar and beyond. In the light of this evidence, the book challenges prevailing arguments that emphasise...

In this book, Pascal Buresi and Hicham El Aallaoui edit, translate, and study an Arabic manuscript of the Royal Library of Rabat, containing 77 appointments of provincial officials. The Almohad Caliphs were the first Berbers to unite the whole Maghrib and the Iberian Peninsula under an imperial ideology elaborated at the end of the 12th C.E. by the most famous scholars, such as Averroes. This peripheral Islamic dynasty produced a pragmatic documentation that provides exceptional information about the administrative, political, ideological, and religious organisation of the largest medieval...

Labyrinths, Intellectuals and the Revolution traces the development of the postcolonial Arabic-language Moroccan novel from its roots in travel narratives and autobiography into its more mature period of stylistic and thematic diversity in the early 1970s. This study first undertakes an exploration of the political, social and artistic conditions under which the genre developed, then moves to close readings of each of the formative texts, grouped by theme. The analysis of these texts centers around their spatial practices: there is a tension between the labyrinthine space of the...

This work presents a study of the history and identity of the Moroccan Bayruk family. The first part of the book gives an outline of the main referents in both the Bayruk vision of 'self', and academic discourses on Maghribian history: the dynasty, caravan and 'tribe'. It identifies discrepancies in scholarly presentations of the Bayruk and traces them back to two overlapping issues of translation and conception. For the remainder of the book a variety of sources are used to highlight the role of textuality in the creation of the Bayruk image in academic discourse. As a result this book...

Au Maroc, les mythes fondateurs des cultes et rituels de guerison illustrent de maniere probante les processus d'elaboration des significations et des dynamiques du pouvoir dans le passe proche et leurs articulations actuelles. Des dynamiques qui se deploient en termes genealogiques, initiatiques et en des capacites socialement reconnues de susciter une communication avec le monde surnaturel. L'analyse centree sur la confrontation entre saints et rois permet, par ailleurs, d'elargir a la dimension nationale, et au-dela, le rapport, hierarchique, de conflit et d'articulation entre charisme...

Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids. The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib investigates the development of legal institutions in the Far Maghrib during its unification with al-Andalus under the Almoravids (434-530/1042-1147). A major contribution to our understanding of the twelfth-century Maghrib and the foundational role played by the Almoravids, it posits that political unification occurred alongside urban transformation and argues that legal institutions developed in response to the social needs of the growing urban spaces as well as to the...

In Saladin, the Almohads and the Banū Ghāniya, Amar Baadj gives us the first comprehensive, modern study of a fascinating but little-known episode in the history of the medieval Mediterranean. This is the story of the long struggle between the Almohad caliphs of the Maghrib, the Banū Ghāniya of Majorca, and the Ayyubids for dominance of North Africa. The author makes use of important textual sources that have been ignored as well as new archaeological evidence to challenge some of the basic assumptions about the events in question. He also successfully places...

La langue berbere au Maghreb medieval constitue un nouvel apport aux etudes historiques et linguistiques dans la mesure ou de nombreux materiaux sur la langue berbere font l'objet d'une monographie specifique. Plusieurs faits de langue sont relies par une trame precise et ils sont reunis afin de mettre en relief les indices textuels puises dans diverses sources ecrites en arabe et en berbere. Dans les quatre parties du livre, il est tour a tour question des apports de la documentation narrative, de la litterature hagiographique et des textes ibadites ainsi que de l'importance des...

Pre-modern Islamic legal practice is most often considered an essentially urban phenomenon. Relying on unedited fatwa collections and other Arabic manuscripts from the oasis of Tuw t in southern Algeria, Droit musulman et societe au Sahara premoderne challenges this vision. The book explores the spread of Islamic legal institutions in the region between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, and the interaction between village communities and Muslim jurists. Ismail Warscheid investigates this process from a dialectical perspective: how were shar norms applied by local...

In spite of its privileged place on the African continent, in the Muslim world and in the Middle East and North Africa region, Algeria remains poorly known, and the works relating to contemporary Algerian society published outside of Algeria are rare. This book seeks to contribute to our understanding of Algerian society today, through its relationships to property and to law. Beyond this, the objective is to propose, in a comparative perspective proper to anthropology, new theoretical and methodological perspectives by which to apprehend the anthropology of law in a Muslim context. Algeria,...