One of the most powerful factors that triggered socio-economic structural changes in Morocco during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century was the expansion of the import of manufactured products from Europe. The diffusion of new items imported from Europe countered the interests of artisans, craftsmen, and merchants who suffered from competition with European goods and prices. In addition, these changes were regarded by some Moroccan ulama among the causes of the weakness of Islam. Suspicion of the population found expression in social unrest and outburst of xenophobic feelings and anti-European protests. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, rumors circulated that Christian manufactured products contained traces of impure substances, and fatwas against European goods were issued in Fez. These preoccupations gave rise to the fatwa, which forms the subject of this essay. The fatwa was written in an unspecified date during the latter part of the nineteenth century by Ja?far bin Idris al-Kattani (d.1905), a prominent Islamic scholar and shaykh al-jama?a, or supreme juridical authority in Morocco. In analyzing this fatwa, I explain al-Kattani’s juristic interpretation and argumentation, while paying close attention to the precedents in Islamic law and tradition that he assembled in order to support his opinion on the permissibility of Christian goods. My interest in this fatwa is as a route into the local content of modern changes, the distinctive nature of the discontent that was derived from these changes, the discursive method and the new consciousness and rationality that accommodated these transformations.