The aim of this paper is to reappraise the process by which the Mālikī school came to dominate the religious sphere of the Maghrib, with a focus on the transmission of Maliki legal texts in Fāṭimid Qayrawān, networks of Mālikī scholars, and their memory. I focus on the memory of the famous Qayrawānī jurist Saḥnūn b. Saʿīd, and the transmission of his influential book the Mudawwana in the formation of the Mālikī tradition. I ask why and how this compilation of Mālik b. Anas’s legal opinions, considered notoriously imperfect by some, surpassed the efforts of all jurists in North Africa and al-Andalus. It is difficult to explain the formation of the Mālikī canon the way it did without considering the intellectual and political contexts, namely the Fāṭimid rule in Ifrīqiya, during which the Mālikī legal community consolidated. To make the argument more explicit, I highlight the social function of texts, with a particular focus on the ṭabaqāt and the circulation of legal texts. The Mālikīs’ interest in composing ṭabaqāt will be contrasted with their contemporary Fāṭimid-Ismāʿīlī scholars, as well as the Ḥanafīs (namely the losing sides). What role did texts play in the formation of communal memory and identity and how did they hold communities together, or facilitate the rise of new communities? Answering these questions, the paper will argue that apart from normative and doctrinal aspects of the texts that facilitated homogeneity and conformity, they also created a social connectivity that reinforced group cohesion. For the Islamic Maghrib and al-Andalus, this played an important role in the consolidation of the Mālikī communities, and the disappearance of the Shīʿīs and Ḥanafīs. The case study will include text reuse data featuring the elaboration of the Mālikī ṭabaqāt, and visualisations of book relations and text transmission networks. Using several innovative approaches, such as macroanalysis and distant reading of texts and quantitative methods, this paper sheds a new light on the history of the formation of the Islamic Maghrib and helps us to understand narrative sources better.

As Yūsuf b. Tāshfīn, ruler of the Almoravids (al-Murābiṭūn 1042-1147), prepared to advance on al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), he took steps to build consensus. He appointed negotiators who met with the representatives of regional leaders. Statements were issued as a result of these meetings, authorizing the Almoravid amīr to intervene in (and eventually conquer) al-Andalus, lending a kind of legitimacy rarely seen or sought by ruler who, by and large, enjoyed considerable momentum and military strength. The Almoravids' appeal for approval from established Muslim authorities has been interpreted mostly as a legitimating strategy for a campaign entering a critical moment. Having run a series of campaigns to stamp out heterodoxy and unbelief, Yūsuf b. Tāshfīn appeared hesitant to move against fellow orthodox Muslim powers. The gesture forms part of a larger narrative of Almoravid deference to orthodox Muslim authorities, notably to Mālikī jurists. Seldom noted, however, is the surprising fact that these negotiations reveal an effective network of inter-regime negotiation: a framework for diplomatic negotiation and law. The first person account by the last Zīrid ruler of Granada, ʿAbd Allāh b. Bullugīn, chronicles his resistance and subsequent surrender to the Almoravid advance and reveals continued engagement with a system of regional negotiation that enjoyed sufficient autonomy and respect to operate between adversary regimes. These were, moreover, not one-time exceptions but part of a longer pattern and resource of which the Almoravids repeatedly and successfully availed themselves. This paper will investigate this lesser studied dimension of Islamic Law, and Mālikī Law specifically, as a framework for regional and inter-state diplomacy and negotiation, using the Almoravid campaign in al-Andalus as a case study. Ibn Buluggīn's chronicle and a variety of legal opinions issued by Andalsui and Maghribi jurists constitute the principle sources. (Note: A version of this abstract was accepted to MESA 2020. I retracted due to work conditions under the pandemic. I look forward to finally presenting the project and am now ready for whatever form of delivery we have in store.)

Triggered by the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, the Portuguese overseas expansion in the fifteenth century transformed Moroccan coastal areas into frontiers between Christians and Muslims. Scholars often discuss this crucial moment for Morocco from a nationalist and state-centered framework, thereby emphasising the roles of ruling dynasties and their jihad movement as the manifestation of national consciousness. These accounts, however, overlook the diversity and fluidity of reactions that local Muslim communities showed to their new aggressive neighbours. In this paper, I argue that Muslim inhabitants, in fact, adopted what we might call ‘improvised diplomacy’ involving a much wider range of survival strategies from alliance, obedience, escape to armed struggle. It was these diverse strategies and negotiations that conditioned the fragile relationship between the conqueror and the conquered. To develop this perspective, I will begin by investigating the identity of diverse actors, such as tribal chieftains, alfaqueques (captive redeemer), new Christians, and Moriscos, who crossed politico-religious boundaries in the north of the country and participated in these improvised negotiations. In so doing, I will use not only Portuguese chronicles and archival records but also Arabic historical and legal texts concerning this period. The analysis will first enable us to understand the broader formation of inter-religious relationships between Portuguese conquerors and tribal communities near the conquered places, which could hardly have expected the protection from the state. Secondly, I will also demonstrate that their provisional practices not only attenuated the effect of violent situations that characterised the relationships of these antagonistic communities until the middle of the century but also paved the way for a more formal, inter-state diplomacy in the last decades of the century. Finally, I will conclude by stressing the importance of ad-hoc negotiations in understanding the inter-religious relationships of the premodern Western Mediterranean. It will contribute to a recent debate on the history of diplomacy that aims to free it from Eurocentric narratives.

During the early career of the West African revolutionary ʿUthmān dan Fodio (d. 1817), he wrote a number of works refuting the theological activities of some contemporaries. These activities centered on the idea that all Muslims must know the basics of Islamic creed in order to count as proper believers and members of their religious community, with creedal ignorance meriting such disciplinary action as annulment of marriage. Historians of Islamic West Africa have noted that dan Fodio’s opponents were likely part of a broader Fulani movement called the kabbenkoobe, although the background of that movement has remained hazy. This paper links the disputes among dan Fodio and his contemporaries to earlier events in the Maghrib, specifically to a controversy that took place in the southeastern Moroccan city of Sijilmāsa late in the 17th century. The scope of the paper is two-fold. First, by drawing on a series of hitherto unstudied manuscripts, I examine the Sijilmāsa controversy from the perspective of several key figures, analyzing their stances and activities, as well as the local resolution of their conflict. Second, I aim to show how the writings and ideas of the controversy’s instigator moved southward, across the Sahel. My initial research suggests that a key network for this movement may have been the Nāṣiriyya Sufi brotherhood. Affiliates of the Nāṣiriyya were intimately involved in the Sijilmāsa episode, and thus relevant texts were likely already in circulation among the Nāṣiriyya as over the next century they set up routes and sites of scholarship extending from the Maghrib through the Sahel and West Africa. By examining these southerly networks of communication and learning, this paper complements the more northern focus of the other papers on the panel and situates the pre-modern Maghrib on its Sahelian as well as its Mediterranean shore.

My project examines prominent tropes of “friendship” that arise in Tunisian palace chronicles and European travelogues from the 18th century as case studies in order to address the following questions: what did “friendship” mean to royals, travelers, enslaved, and free individuals interacting in elite settings in the Ottoman Regency of Tunis? How did bonds of friendship intersect with notions of dependency or communal boundaries in this early-modern administrative state? How did such an intersection enable performative proliferation, or limit, discursive constructions of homosociality in 18th and early 19th-century Tunis? Finally, how did these earlier bonds of friendship and dependency shape the political and social trajectory of Ottoman Tunis’s state formation in the 19th century? Drawing from theories that have alternately stressed social status, political futurity, and interdependency as key historical motivators to cementing amity, I argue that friendship was an ambiguous category of analysis in elite spaces of 18th-century Tunis, operating both hierarchically as well as dialectically. Examples include advice-giving between a royal figure and elite “intimates,” secrets exchanged between a royal and an enslaved or freed minister, and promises of gifts, advancement, or manumission made by a royal to a more marginal enslaved figure enlisted to execute a violent or difficult task. Close critical analysis of a diversity of situations described as “friendship” by chroniclers of different positionalities offers the opportunity to center understudied social formations in the “pre-colonial” history of Tunis. This project also frames these formations in a wider transregional context, particularly considering that Tunis was a central node for Mediterranean diplomacy as well as Mediterranean and Trans-Saharan slave trading. Ultimately, because intimate bonds informed shifts in governmentalized tactics, later state formation cannot be understood without a close examination of the communal boundaries of reciprocity, or “friendship,” between the governing and the governed in 18th-century Ottoman Tunis.