Allal al-Fassi: Visions of Shariʿa in Post-Colonial Moroccan State Law

Allal al-Fassi is one of the most formative figures in twentieth-century Moroccan intellectual history. Most scholarship on al-Fassi focuses on either his political manoeuvring (colonial and post-colonial) or his vision of Islamic modernism in the 1950s–60s. In this paper, I propose to bridge these two aspects of al-Fassi’s multifaceted life by examining two specific issues that occupied his post-colonial political and intellectual endeavors. The first is the 1957 Moroccan Personal Status Code (Mudawwana) for which al-Fassi served on the codification commission. The second is the 1965 Law of Legal Unification, in support of which al-Fassi intervened publicly. In both cases, al-Fassi underscored the political stakes of supporting these initiatives in the new state while insisting that they preserved Islamic legal tradition. Using multiple source materials, I argue that al-Fassi promoted each initiative by envisioning a flexible all-encompassing Islamic legal tradition as the ultimate foil to Morocco’s colonial past. Al-Fassi’s construction of historical narrative is particularly crucial to ground both political initiatives in Islamic precedent. I ultimately propose that al-Fassi’s use of these argumentative methods stands out as much as the substance of the projects themselves.