THE MAGHREB THROUGH LANGUAGE (French original)
Ahmed Soussi
SEPT. 4
There is something strange, at first glance, about the status of Malikism in Morocco. A school of jurisprudence—that is, a set of methods for deriving legal rules from the Quran and the prophetic tradition—occupies a place there that is reserved elsewhere for political ideologies. The Constitution and official discourse make it one of the three pillars of national religious identity, alongside Ash’ari dogma and Sunni Sufism, and the king himself, in his capacity as Commander of the Faithful, presents himself as its guarantor. The 2003 “Throne Speech” states it unequivocally, attributing the choice of a state independent of the Eastern Caliphate, distinguished by “the exclusivity of the Maliki rite,”¹ to fourteen centuries of history. Understanding how a corpus of Medinan private law from the eighth century became the ideological keystone of a modern state requires tracing the chain back from the founder to the Palace.
A Realist Jurist in a Torn Age
Malik Ibn Anas was born in Medina at the end of the first century of the Hijra, in a city that was no longer the political center of the Muslim empire, which had shifted to Damascus under the Umayyads, but remained dar al-hijra, the home of the Prophet’s emigration. The generation of the Prophet’s companions passed away, and that of their successors soon followed, making the question of who held the legal standard a burning issue. This occurred amidst a climate of intellectual ferment, where the created versus uncreated origin of the Quran and the risks of anthropomorphism in the literal interpretation of Quranic verses were being debated.² It was in this context that Malik composed the first major treatise on Islamic law, the Muwatta, which compiled the Medinan consensus on matters of ritual and social practices.³ His method was distinctive in that it relied primarily on the hadiths, whose proliferation was already beginning to pose a problem, and in its emphasis on the lived practices of Medina’s inhabitants, the consensus of the city’s scholars, and a principle of public utility, istislah, which allowed the jurist to consider the common good where the texts were silent.⁴
Faced with the major theological disputes of his time, Malik consistently adopted a middle ground. For him, the caliphate was not a matter of faith but a question of the community’s commonly accepted interests, and he established the principle of the validity of the rule of a less deserving caliph, despite the existence of a more deserving one.⁵ In modern terms, one would say he was politically realistic and pragmatic. This realism did not protect him from power, however, as the Abbasid caliph Ja’far al-Mansur had him tortured for a fatwa on the invalidity of divorce under duress, a practice the Shiite revolutionaries exploited politically by applying it by analogy to extorted oaths of allegiance—an episode that has remained in tradition as the torture of Malik, the mihna.⁶ The episode was quickly closed, however, since it was the same caliph who later commissioned him to write the Muwatta as the common text of nascent Sunni Islam. Legal realism and political pragmatism are thus inherent in Maliki jurisprudence from its inception, not as a compromise but as a doctrine whose most concise formulation is the advice Malik is said to have given to a Maghrebi visitor who came to inquire about the proper conduct: to adhere to the five pillars of Islam and to avoid conflict with anyone.⁷
Why the Maghreb, why Morocco?
The establishment of the rite in North Africa was no accident. North Africa in the early centuries of Islam was experiencing the same upheavals as the East, and the Amazigh initially embraced the egalitarian ideology of the Kharijites en masse, precisely because it challenged the Arab superiority upon which the Umayyad ideology was based, before adopting the literalist principles of the Awza’i school, which were widespread in al-Andalus.⁸ The subsequent embrace of Maliki Islam can be analyzed as a distancing movement, adopting the Medinan rite and withdrawing from the theological and political dissensions tearing the East apart—neither Shi’ism, nor Mu’tazilism, nor caliphate conflicts. The nascent Moroccan state added a decisive political dimension. Idris I, founder of the first autonomous dynasty at the end of the eighth century, undertook a unification of faith by combating religious minorities, including Muslims, and by establishing the Maliki rite as the only officially recognized rite. Remarkably, the Idrisids themselves, of Shiite origin, eventually became absorbed into the surrounding popular Sunni culture, with the population transforming love for the descendants of the Prophet into the foundation of their culture rather than a political doctrine….
Read the whole article at THE MAGHREB THROUGH LANGUAGE (original in French)
