Judgment of the Moroccan Supreme Council of Shariʿa Appeals, Ruling No. 52 on Issue No. 4164 in 1943 on Inheritance, Slavery, and Paternity (1359/1943)

This chapter explores an unusually complicated sixteen-year-long (1928-44) inheritance and paternity dispute that arose originally in the first-instance Sharīʿa Court of Casablanca. The central question in the case was whether the plaintiff’s grandson was entitled to inherit his father and grandfather. The dispute provides numerous lenses into uses of the past as it concerns a Sharīʿa court operating in an ostensible judicial plurality established and enforced by a colonial power (French Protectorate Morocco, 1912-56). Although the judges’ competence was narrowed by the fact of French hegemony, they still enjoyed sufficient independence to use their own legal traditions to adjudicate the cases before them.