Ari Schriber (Utrecht University): Sharīʿa, droit musulman, and Colonial Legality: The Conflict of “Paternity Claim” (istilḥāq) in Colonial-Era Moroccan Courts
Afternoon Talk on Islamic Law
- Datum: 30.11.2023
- Uhrzeit: 16:00
- Ort: Hybrid-Veranstaltung
About the speaker
Ari
Schriber is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Utrecht University.
His research interests lie at the intersection of 20th-century Islamic legal
history and colonial history of the Middle East and North Africa. Schriber is
particularly interested in investigating evolving traditions of Islamic court
practice in colonial and post-colonial Morocco. He is currently preparing a
monograph based on his doctoral thesis, Shari’a
of the Colony: Judgeship, Proof, and Legal Modernity in Morocco, 1912-1965.
Prior to coming to Utrecht, Schriber was Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow
at the University of Toronto (2021-2023). He completed his PhD (2021) and
Masters (2013) in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at
Harvard University and holds a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and Religious
Studies from the University of Virginiat.
About the topic
How
did colonial legalities impact the determination of paternity and inheritance
in Islamic legal practice? Ari Schriber examines this question through the lens
of shari’a courts in colonial-era Morocco. He will use a paradigmatic
three-decade dispute (1922-1956) to delineate core conflicts between French
colonial claims to Islamic law and regional Islamic legal traditions for
resolving ambiguous paternity. The dispute revolved around the capacity for a
child of an enslaved mother to inherit land from his father. Both colonial
French courts and Moroccan shari’a courts claimed jurisdiction for the case,
each claiming to issue a decision based on Islamic law — with starkly
contradictory rulings. In accounting for this outcome, Ari Schriber focuses on
the concept of “paternity claim” (istilḥāq) in
the Mālikī school of Islamic law that revolves around the social-legal status
of enslaved mothers calling particular attention to the pivotal role of
fact-finding—evidence, proof, and procedure—as a paradigmatic tension between
colonial claims to Islamic law and local traditions of Islamic court practice.
Overall, he seeks to demonstrate the granular yet transformative impact of this
tension in producing a competing version of Islamic law in the colonial and
postcolonial state.
Der Vortrag findet als Hybridveranstaltung statt, sowohl vor Ort im Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht, Mittelweg 187, 20148 Hamburg als auch als Videokonferenz über Zoom.
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