1 - Legal Regimes and Colonial Cultures

Summary

In the late fifteenth century, as Christians were extending their rule over the remaining pockets of Moorish dominion in the Iberian peninsula, a North African legal scholar named Al-Wansharishi issued a legal finding (fatwa) to address the situation of an influential Muslim advocate in Marbella. The man in Marbella wished to obey the edict directing good Muslims to abandon Christian jurisdictions in Spain, but he felt compelled to stay and continue to work as an advocate for Moors whose property and livelihood were being threatened under Christian rule. His appearances before Christian judges to represent Muslims seemed a worthy cause, one that he apparently thought would warrant an exception to the edict. The mufti disagreed. He ruled that it was the man's duty to flee Spain. Contact with Christians – particularly the close dealings with Christian judges that the advocate's role would require – was a form of contamination. The Moors staying behind were, in any case, hardly entitled to such care since they were already breaking with Muslim authority by staying in a Christian jurisdiction, the mufti explained. They should be left to their own devices.

Al-Wansharishi made it clear that it was Christian authority, not Christians themselves, that made contamination inevitable. Christians with subject status posed no particular threat. But to live under Christian rule was “not allowable, not for so much as one hour a day, because of all the dirt and filth involved, and the religious and secular corruption which continues all the time.”