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.
