Fatwās on Jihād from Premodern Morocco

Abstract

This article provides an Arabic critical edition of one section of an important but unpublished source for the history of late fifteenth-century Morocco: al-Jawāhir al-mukhtāra fī-mā waqaftu ʿalayhi min al-nawāzil bi-Jibāl Ghumāra (Selected jewels: Legal cases I encountered in the Ghumāra Mountains) by the Mālikī jurist ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. al-Ḥasan al-Zayyātī (d. 1055/1645). Although this multivolume collection of legal opinions (fatwās) was compiled in the mid-seventeenth century, it includes numerous fatwās from the fifteenth century onward that do not appear in earlier works, including Aḥmad al-Wansharīsī’s (d. 914/1508) famous collection of fatwās, al-Miʿyār al-muʿrib. This excerpt from the chapter on jihād sheds substantial light on Maghribī legal responses to the Portuguese occupation of Moroccan ports beginning in the fifteenth century. An introduction to the Arabic edition explains the importance of this period and offers an English summary of the Arabic text.