5 - ‘Those Who Represent the Sovereign in his Absence’: Muslim Scholarship and the Question of Legal Authority in the Pre-Modern Sahara (Southern Algeria, Mauritania, Mali), 1750–1850

Summary

In one of his legal opinions (fatwā, pl. fatāwā), Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Tinilānī (d. 1233/1817–18), a Muslim scholar from the oases of Tuwāt in presentday southern Algeria, compares the work of qāḍīs and muftis in his region with legal practice in Fez, which was then one of the most prominent centres of Islamic learning in Western Africa:

There is no difference in the nature of legal decisions issued in our country and those issued in Fes. The principles of the sharia do not vary when countries change and differences between them become apparent. This is because the message of our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, is of universal validity, directed to all of humanity and to any place in the world.

Al-Tinilānī's fatwā emphasizes the claim of Islamic law to be universal and, furthermore, insists on a fundamental equality between all Muslims with regard to their duties and rights. His conception of what I would call an Islamic legal space is nonetheless a hierarchical one. The mufti implicitly distinguishes between a centre and a periphery. His fatwā refers to the city of Fez as the natural environment for the application of Islamic religious and legal norms. Like many of his contemporaries, al-Tinilānī identifies these norms as being inherent to settled urban life (ḥaḍāra). However, he maintains that they are transferable to any geographical and social context, since they emanate from a divine revelation. Seen from this vantage, his position – and the very existence of his fatwā – challenges the long-standing tradition of Western scholarship to postulate a ‘great divide’ separating rural and urban societies in North and West Africa.

A few decades later, another Saharan jurist, Muḥammad al-Māmī (d. 1282/1865–6), a nomad from the Tiris region in present-day northern Mauritania, provides a fairly different account on the relationship between Islamic legal scholarship as a part of ‘urban civilization’ (ʿumrān) and the ‘nomad way of life’ (badāwa), to speak in Khaldunian terms. In his Book of the Desert (Kitāb al-Bādiya), he writes:

It appeared to our scholars […] that there are many questions peculiar to the inhabitants of the desert (masāʾil ahl al-bādiya al-khāṣa bihim) on which no one has made authoritative statements [literally: no one has spoken] and on which no writings (muṣannaf) exist … This is because legal literature originates from cities (madīniyya).