Periodic Reporting for period 1 - QuantISLAMS (Quantifying Islamic Law in the Modern State: Shari'a in Moroccan Courts, 1912-2012)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-08-31
Religious law endures as a critical component of legal systems in the Middle East and North Africa. The specific role of Islamic law in state courts remains intensely contested by scholars, policy makers, and activists alike. The project “Quantifying Islamic Law in the Modern State” embraced these debates to interrogate the role of Islamic legal tradition in determining courtroom outcomes. The rules of Islamic law are outwardly based on centuries-old scripture and legal texts, yet since the mid-twentieth century, Muslim-majority nations worldwide have legislated Islamic law-based codes to standardize its rules. The state-imposed codification of Islamic law has gained immense attention from historians and anthropologists, who question whether a religious tradition can truly exist as state legislation. States further have limited these codes primarily to family law, making them the center of scrutiny for assessing ongoing inequalities of women and minority groups. However, such lines of inquiry predominantly account for Islamic law by highlighting discrepancies between classical Islamic legal texts and state codes. Nevertheless, legal scholars long have recognized that legal texts do not necessarily reflect law in practice, especially in Islamic legal contexts. Stakeholders of Islamic law have little indication of how judges themselves determined Islamic law-based rulings in the courtroom in modern states. This issue raises a deeper question with critical implications for the future of religious law: to what extent does Islamic law transform if state legislators—and not religious scholars—dictate its functioning?
This project contends that understanding the impact of modern state institutions requires establishing what Islamic law was in the era directly prior to their installation. “Quantifying Islamic Law” uses methods of statistical text analysis to reconstruct Islamic legal tradition in court practice prior to state codification of shari’a. It does so in the context of Morocco, a nation with a rich Islamic legal tradition and a contemporary government that claims to uphold it through its codified family law. Using a corpus of approximately 800 judgements issued by the Supreme Council of Shariʿa Appeals (SCSA, 1921-1957), “Quantifying Islamic Law” tracks references to core sources of Islamic legal tradition: jurists and their texts. In their aggregate, the judgements demonstrate how Moroccan judges deployed a particular tradition comprised of Islamic legal texts, local customs, and/or state legislation. The project therefore uses the citation data to center judges’ cumulative vision of Islamic legal tradition. Doing so transcends the often-blatant political language of state legislation or the voluminous and systematic Islamic textual tradition. The cumulative data from this corpus of judgements provides a new quantitative basis for understanding the most important sources of Islamic law as invoked by judges in a local and contextualized legal field.
This project contends that understanding the impact of modern state institutions requires establishing what Islamic law was in the era directly prior to their installation. “Quantifying Islamic Law” uses methods of statistical text analysis to reconstruct Islamic legal tradition in court practice prior to state codification of shari’a. It does so in the context of Morocco, a nation with a rich Islamic legal tradition and a contemporary government that claims to uphold it through its codified family law. Using a corpus of approximately 800 judgements issued by the Supreme Council of Shariʿa Appeals (SCSA, 1921-1957), “Quantifying Islamic Law” tracks references to core sources of Islamic legal tradition: jurists and their texts. In their aggregate, the judgements demonstrate how Moroccan judges deployed a particular tradition comprised of Islamic legal texts, local customs, and/or state legislation. The project therefore uses the citation data to center judges’ cumulative vision of Islamic legal tradition. Doing so transcends the often-blatant political language of state legislation or the voluminous and systematic Islamic textual tradition. The cumulative data from this corpus of judgements provides a new quantitative basis for understanding the most important sources of Islamic law as invoked by judges in a local and contextualized legal field.
“Quantifying Islamic Law” hypothesizes that the pre-codification Islamic legal tradition of Morocco can be reconstructed using statistical text analysis on case records. The systematic availability of SCSA records—and especially their rich detail and explanations—makes them a uniquely viable source for achieving this goal. The project therefore uses text mining methods with the R statistical programming language to extract relevant data from an Arabic text corpus of approximately 800 SCSA records. The primary metric that the project adopts for tracking jurists is total cases mentioning a jurist (or their texts) at least once. This choice reflects the desire to trace jurist mentions across the corpus without skewing the data based on total overall mentions. The goal therein is to reconstruct the most important sources of Islamic legal tradition on the eve of its codification based on the frequency with which judges refer to them. Beyond tracking jurist and text data, the text mining also includes the frequency of certain concepts occurring (e.g. religious opinions, paternity disputes, or female expert witnesses), and the frequency of certain litigant demographics appearing before the shari’a courts (e.g. Jews and the enslaved).
The project has identified over 200 individual jurists, plus the Qur’an and Hadith, through long-term qualitative reading of the cases (it is plausible that additional jurists are cited in the SCSA corpus that have not yet been identified). Although judges mention both jurist names and names of texts, the project includes text mentions as mentions of their author. This decision both simplifies the quantitative results and reflects the importance of authorship in Islamic legal tradition. Since judges scarcely refer to jurists or their texts by the full name, the qualitative work prior to text analysis likewise identified terms and phrases by which judges refer to a single author and/or their text. The code used for text analysis therefore counted any appearance of such terms as a mention of the author. In preparation for the text analysis with R, printed SCSA records were transformed into text format using OCR software for Arabic, with additional handwritten cases transcribed by hand into digital text format. These case texts were combined into a single text document, where multiple hand edits were made to prepare for the text analysis. These edits included correcting OCR errors and distinguishing jurist names from common names or terms (for example, the term "malik" could refer to a famous jurist or simply to the word for "owner"). The list of 200+ jurists (and their respective terms) was compiled for searching in the corpus to compile a list of appearances per case. All positive results for all terms were scrutinized by hand to ensure that any false positives were eliminated. Following these steps, the project produced the desired dataset: the frequency with which judges of Moroccan Islamic courts from 1921-1957 referred to over 200 sources. The results provided key insights into the most important sources of Islamic legal tradition into the mid-20th century (see next section).
The project has identified over 200 individual jurists, plus the Qur’an and Hadith, through long-term qualitative reading of the cases (it is plausible that additional jurists are cited in the SCSA corpus that have not yet been identified). Although judges mention both jurist names and names of texts, the project includes text mentions as mentions of their author. This decision both simplifies the quantitative results and reflects the importance of authorship in Islamic legal tradition. Since judges scarcely refer to jurists or their texts by the full name, the qualitative work prior to text analysis likewise identified terms and phrases by which judges refer to a single author and/or their text. The code used for text analysis therefore counted any appearance of such terms as a mention of the author. In preparation for the text analysis with R, printed SCSA records were transformed into text format using OCR software for Arabic, with additional handwritten cases transcribed by hand into digital text format. These case texts were combined into a single text document, where multiple hand edits were made to prepare for the text analysis. These edits included correcting OCR errors and distinguishing jurist names from common names or terms (for example, the term "malik" could refer to a famous jurist or simply to the word for "owner"). The list of 200+ jurists (and their respective terms) was compiled for searching in the corpus to compile a list of appearances per case. All positive results for all terms were scrutinized by hand to ensure that any false positives were eliminated. Following these steps, the project produced the desired dataset: the frequency with which judges of Moroccan Islamic courts from 1921-1957 referred to over 200 sources. The results provided key insights into the most important sources of Islamic legal tradition into the mid-20th century (see next section).
The results speak to the most important aspects of Islamic legal tradition in this time and place of Morocco. Over 80% of cases mention at least one jurist, indicating the importance of entrenching judicial rulings in Islamic legal tradition. First, the quantiative methods confirm what scholars of the region long have hypothesized: that the most important base text for law was a short 14th-century compendium authored by an Egyptian jurist, Khalil (d. 1365), who is mentioned in almost half of all rulings. Similarly, the versified judicial manual of Granadan jurist Ibn Asim (d. 1426) is the second-most mentioned jurist in just over 40% of rulings. Beyond these two jurists, however, the results show several important points. First, the diversity of jurists mentioned in terms of time, origin, and genre. The jurists include the earliest jurists from 8th-century Medina and a robust set of legal commentators from 18th-19th century Morocco. They also include a robust set of jurists from the historical al-Andalus ("Muslim Iberia") whose works remained critical through the twentieth century. The breadth of jurists and texts also includes legal genres that were critical to Islamic jurisprudence in this region: collections of precedent legal opinions (nawāzil), local judicial practice (ʿamal), and perhaps most importantly--and most often overlooked--documentation manuals (wathāʾiq). The data also shows that judges relied on prolific scholarly output of Moroccan jurists from approximately the 16th-19th centuries, a period long presumed to be merely derivative of more famous classical texts.These authors not only produced their own texts but rearticulated earlier texts in commentaries or supercommentaries to update them for their contemporary and geographic context.
Other data extracted demonstrates several key important points about Islamic legal practice of this context. For example, the regional-specific twelve-person testimony (lafif), while foreign to other Islamic legal contexts, was used extremely often--appearing in over half of cases. Similarly, judges relied heavily on the oath, an oft-overlooked yet critical procedure of Islamic courts to resolve disputes where neither party had strong evidence. Using terms associated with Jews, the data also shows that Jews still litigated relatively frequently in Islamic courts in the 1920s but almost disappeared by the 1940s and 50s--undoubtedly a result of colonial reification of religious jurisdiction. Finally, term searches for slavery indicate the infrequent yet ongonig of presence of enslaved litigants in Moroccan Islamic courts through the entirety of the SCSA's existence.
Further research will include using the same methods on court cases from the approximate first decade after this project ends in 1957. This period corresponds both to Moroccan independence from French colonial rule and the promulgation of the Moroccan Code of Personal Status based on Islamic law. While judges still refer to Islamic jurists and their texts, the future work will very likely show a stark reduction in the breadth of sources to which judges refer in the post-codification era.
Other data extracted demonstrates several key important points about Islamic legal practice of this context. For example, the regional-specific twelve-person testimony (lafif), while foreign to other Islamic legal contexts, was used extremely often--appearing in over half of cases. Similarly, judges relied heavily on the oath, an oft-overlooked yet critical procedure of Islamic courts to resolve disputes where neither party had strong evidence. Using terms associated with Jews, the data also shows that Jews still litigated relatively frequently in Islamic courts in the 1920s but almost disappeared by the 1940s and 50s--undoubtedly a result of colonial reification of religious jurisdiction. Finally, term searches for slavery indicate the infrequent yet ongonig of presence of enslaved litigants in Moroccan Islamic courts through the entirety of the SCSA's existence.
Further research will include using the same methods on court cases from the approximate first decade after this project ends in 1957. This period corresponds both to Moroccan independence from French colonial rule and the promulgation of the Moroccan Code of Personal Status based on Islamic law. While judges still refer to Islamic jurists and their texts, the future work will very likely show a stark reduction in the breadth of sources to which judges refer in the post-codification era.