Rosemary Admiral, Living Law: Women and Legality in Marinid Morocco (Syracuse University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Rosemary Admiral (RA): Living Law is a history of how women encountered and navigated Islamic law in premodern Morocco. I actually started out with an interest in how women engaged with Islamic family law in modern Morocco, but I found it challenging to understand the contentious debates surrounding contemporary law without knowing what law looked like before colonialism, independence, and legal reforms. Particularly around the 2004 reforms to the Moroccan personal status law, or family law (the Mudawwana, which covers areas such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody), all sides made claims to what was “Islamic” law or “Sharia”, and the connection of the Mudawwana to classical Islamic law. Featured in this discourse were assumptions and projections about this modern relationship and what it meant historically, usually made without interrogating historical sources. I wanted to understand how the law functioned before colonialism in order to better disentangle the widely understood notion that the Mudawwana is a slightly updated form of traditional Islamic family law.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
RA: The title “Living Law” introduces and foregrounds the key concerns and arguments of the book. “Living law” here refers to how women lived with the law, drawing it into many aspects of their daily lives, interpersonal relationships, and disputes. It also gestures to the dynamic, “living” nature of the law itself, and how the law was adapting and accommodating in ways that are revealed through these historical legal sources. This particular history of women could not be written without legal sources, and this particular history of law could not be written without the concerns women brought to the attention of the legal system. In constructing the dual, yet intertwined, narratives of women’s history and legal history, this research shows that legal theory was translated into practice in a way that met the needs of women and enabled the visions they had for their families, despite an inequality in gendered rights built into the law.
Living Law examines these histories and relationships through three types of cases—marriage, divorce, and sexual transgressions. These cases for the most part involve women who were not part of the elite, and legal sources are one of the only types of historical sources from this time period that document any aspect of the lives of non-elite women. Alongside the stories of women’s encounters with the law, side stories are woven throughout—the education and biographies of the jurists, women’s education and access to learning, and the self-confidence of the ruling dynasty in Marinid Morocco.
More broadly, Living Law fits into literatures that highlight premodern women’s voices and activities, histories of Muslim women, and studies of how women interacted with Islamic law. But the focus on women should not stop it from being considered alongside historical studies of the implementation of Islamic law.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
RA: This is my first book and it has been years in the making. What drives my research is a fundamental interest in women’s lives and histories. My previous publications have perhaps centered women more intentionally, while still maintaining a legal thread. With Living Law, my work evolved into a study of law through the lives of women, and is equally significant for what it says about the law. It is still very much a history of women, and readers will learn about women’s lives, relationships, opportunities, and how they envisioned their ideal family, but in most cases, sources do not even reveal their names or much about them beyond their encounter with the legal system. Even in the central case that frames the book, about the young woman from Taza who ran away from home and confessed to zina (fornication) to try and force a marriage to the man of her choosing—the sources never mention her name, or what happened with her life after the case. From these fragments of the lives of women and their encounters with the law, we get a nuanced picture of the nature of law and how it translates in this historical, cultural, and political context.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
RA: I wrote Living Law with a number of audiences in mind. The first audience was my own undergraduate students. The book should be of interest to specialists and those interested in premodern women’s history, in histories of Muslim women, in North African history, and in studies of Islamic law and how it was implemented historically. This study will also allow those more familiar with the central Middle East to see a North African perspective and understand both similarities and distinctions between these areas.
But Living Law is also intended for audiences beyond academia, and this relates to the impact I hope the book will have. Both scholars and laypeople tend to look to legal theory and doctrine as a way of understanding law. Here I emphasize the importance of history and historical context when thinking about women and their relationship to Islamic law. Analyzing theoretical legal texts alone will not help us understand women’s lives (or the law for that matter), and likewise we cannot look at women’s situations or challenges in the present and make assumptions or projections about women’s lives or circumstances in the past. Investigating historical sources makes visible a more comprehensive picture of how the law was lived and the systems that supported it, from family and neighbors to scholars and government institutions.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
RA: My next book project investigates women’s education and scholarship in the premodern Islamic West. It is in some ways an offshoot of Living Law, as I encountered women in the biographies of the jurists, scholars, and sultans who made up the legal and intellectual world of Marinid Morocco. But my research revealed a much more extensive tradition of women’s learning across the Islamic West, which led to an expansion of the geographic area and temporal scope as I found more and more examples of learned women in biographical literature and other sources. I have been working on this book alongside Living Law for a number of years, and I conducted initial research in Tunisia and Morocco in 2017 with an AIMS (American Institute for North African Studies) grant and further research in 2023-2024 in Morocco on a Fulbright grant.
This book shows how women were embedded in the intellectual world of elite men, even if at the margins and outside of institutional settings. Unlike the ordinary women who inhabit the pages of Living Law, this next book shifts the focus to elite women, including women from scholarly families and the royal palace. Also of interest is how these learned women were memorialized over time and how their legacies were reshaped by scholars and activists in the context of modern debates on the role and authority of women in public life.
J: How did writing this book provide insight into your initial questions about modern Moroccan family law?
RA: Researching Living Law made it exceedingly clear to me that law is not just a line in a book or a legal code—it is a living, dynamic, interaction between litigants, legal scholars, the community, and political authorities. Both supporters and detractors of the modern Moroccan Mudawwana seem to equate it with “Islamic law”. My preliminary conclusion is that even if a legal principle from five hundred years ago looks similar to an article in a modern legal code such as the Mudawwana, there is really a fundamental disconnect. Even the way people view and interact with the Islamic law has transformed, from a starting point for negotiation in the Marinid period to sacred and untouchable in its codification as a European-style legal code. The Mudawwana shows aspects of continuity with premodern legal traditions, but also sharp breaks that are not always acknowledged. For its critics, it is assumed that the inequalities faced by women in the law are a backward historical holdover, rather than a result of modern social, legal, or economic circumstances.
This brings me back to my interest in how people think about and interact with past, how negative things can just be brushed away as backwards or archaic, as if belonging to some other time and place we have no control over, rather than being problems born out of modernity. I look forward to doing more research in this area to better understand how women navigate the Moroccan Mudawwana today and learning more about where they find support structures.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 5: Negotiating Marital Life, pages 101 to 105)
Taza Anecdote
The woman at the center of the Taza case wanted to get married, a common aspiration among young people. She had her eye on a particular groom, her neighbor, Ibn al-Turjuman. In the case she brought to the judge of Taza, she stated that he was the only man she wanted to marry. Typically, at this point, her father or another close family member would arrange the marriage with the prospective groom’s family, taking care to ensure that the bride’s financial rights were secured in the marriage. Ibrahim al-Anbaki claimed that he tried to arrange other marriages on his daughter’s behalf, but she rejected them. As she told the judge: “It is my desire to get married and I am asking to do so. There is no husband for me except the one who asked for my hand now, and I refuse anyone but him.” However, because the young woman was a virgin (which was the usual assumption about a woman who had not been previously married), she did not actually have the power to reject a marriage that her father arranged. A typical father might listen to his daughter’s desires and take her point of view into account, but al-Anbaki was not a typical father, and technically, the power rested in his hands. The first time al-Anbaki contracted a marriage for his daughter, the young man returned to al-Anbaki before its consummation, claimed he was scared of Ibn al-Turjuman, and asked to be let out of the contract—perhaps the latter had threatened or intimidated him. When the father left town to try and contract another marriage for his daughter farther away from the drama of Taza, perhaps hoping the gossip or Ibn al-Turjuman’s threats would not reach a distant groom, the daughter did the only thing in her power—she ran away and sought refuge with the judge.
Because the young woman’s father opposed the marriage, she was forced to take creative steps in order to marry Ibn al-Turjuman, including a (possibly false) confession of zina. The case the young woman brought to the qadi conveniently contained elements that addressed each possible exception in Maliki law that would help destabilize a father’s authority over the marriage of his (virgin) daughter. And so, in the midst of this messy conflict that continued even after the death of the judge, the young woman was able to marry Ibn al-Turjuman.
Introduction
The case of the young woman from Taza presents an extreme example of the lengths a woman would go to in order to achieve her marriage goals, and the lengths a father would go to in order to prevent his daughter’s marriage to a man he hated. The behavior of neither father nor daughter was representative of other marriage cases. And yet, the young woman’s story allows us to explore more typical aspects of marital relations in legal doctrine and social practice, such as adding stipulations (shurut) to a marriage contract that protected or enhanced a bride’s rights. Stipulations were often included in marriage contract negotiations and allowed women to secure a better position for themselves within a marriage, by using the legal strategies available to mitigate the impact of marriage laws that seemed to leave them with little decision-making power.
Women had many opportunities to express their desires and advocate for their interests during the process of contracting a marriage. This was not a solitary or independent activity. Negotiations over a marriage, especially in the case of a first marriage, often involved male family members negotiating on behalf of the bride. After agreeing to a particular husband, the overwhelming concerns of women and their families were financial, and the main goal was to secure a wife’s long-term material security. Emotional needs were also considered in the process, although this led families into more legally contested territory.
Islamic legal doctrine gave a father extensive rights in contracting a marriage for his daughter. The case of the young woman from Taza appears to prove what one might fear from reading Maliki beliefs: that because a father had the right to force his (virgin) daughter into marriage, he would do so. This case, however, is highly exceptional, and hundreds of other cases do not support this reading. Legal doctrine also gave a husband gendered rights in marriage, such as taking another sexual partner or controlling divorce. But what the doctrine outlined was actually the baseline for what marriage and family arrangements should look like, and not some kind of ideal for the family. Women were able to draw on competing notions of more egalitarian relationships from the Quran and the example of the Prophet’s life. The law itself provided the tools for women to adjust these terms to achieve marital configurations that were closer to what they wanted.
In practice, women had multiple opportunities to intervene in the marriage process. This included the chance to express displeasure about a specific suitor before marriage, at times very forcefully; looking for technicalities in the law that would prevent her marriage to a certain man; and designating a particular marriage guardian (wali) in the case of orphans and other women without guardians to facilitate a desirable marriage choice. After a groom was agreed upon, a woman had various strategies available to help improve her position in a marriage. Demands for a good dower (sadaq), often facilitated by a father or another guardian, helped to ensure her financial stability.
Stipulations inserted in marriage contracts or volunteered after the marriage were one strategy for limiting a husband’s rights. These included preventing a husband from taking a second wife or concubine, moving a wife away from her family, or limiting his wife’s mobility. At the same time, stipulations served to expand the rights of a woman in a marriage, or to provide a means of enforcing the rights to which she was legally entitled. Stipulations could also signal a vision for combining two families, with the new husband agreeing to take care of his wife’s children from a previous marriage, a family configuration that Islamic law did not explicitly condone. Such stipulations were utilized at different times and places throughout the Muslim world and provided a legally valid path for creating a marriage that more closely matched the needs of both parties.
The conditions varied depending on the time and place, as did responses from the jurists when these contract clauses were disputed. As a woman entered marriage with fewer rights than her husband, stipulations were always used to expand a wife’s rights and reduce those of her husband. The law established the starting point for marital relations and from there a husband and wife could renegotiate to enhance the financial, emotional, and legal security of the wife.
This chapter examines conflicts that arose in Marinid Morocco over contract stipulations that restricted a man’s authority in his marriage, specifically those that regulated polygamy and caring for stepchildren. Information about these stipulations, preserved in fatwa records, reveals what was important to women in a marriage, and how women and their families worked to create secure and stable partnerships. Cases show that many women desired a monogamous marriage, despite a husband’s fundamental legal right to have other wives and concubines. Financial disputes also suggest more complicated family configurations than those defined in legal theory, with husbands agreeing at the time of marriage to assume responsibilities for their stepchildren, which were not required by law. These cases also provide insight into why men would relinquish some of the rights to which they were entitled. Although Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) put more emphasis on preserving and enforcing men’s rights in marriage and the family, the law also had built-in mechanisms that women could exploit to partially level the playing field, one of which was the use of marriage contract stipulations. Marriage contracts provided a mechanism through which a couple could redefine the gendered rights and responsibilities enshrined in Islamic law and these rights were transferred or revoked with a surprising ease.
These cases show that what seem like stable categories that deeply enshrined male privilege were actually open to a certain degree of negotiation. As discussed in the case of the young woman from Taza and seen in discussions about marriage here, a father’s absolute right to control his daughter’s marriage arrangements was much more fluid in practice. Likewise, a husband’s right to have multiple legal sexual partners (up to four wives and unlimited concubines, if he could afford it), a symbol of status and masculinity, was restricted in marriage contracts. And the law’s primary concern with lineage as traced only through the father still held, while also allowing a second husband to accept the duties of the father in raising his children, a duty taken on willingly by stepfathers. The power of father over daughter, the sexual license of the husband, and the strict legal view of the father as the only provider for his children; all these gender identities were subject to reconfiguration as couples and their families negotiated marriage arrangements that met the needs of all parties, but particularly the women who gained rights not granted to them by the law and were able to keep their children from a previous marriage and integrate them into a new family unit.