Judicial Practice as Islamic Law: The ʿAmal of Fez in Post-Classical Mālikī Legal Tradition

Judicial practice (‘amal) is a critical feature of post-classical Mālikī law in the Maghrib. The scholars who have examined contend that it presents a paradigm of Mālikī law’s flexibility and judicial responsiveness to custom (‘urf). However, also constitute a significant part of the regional Islamic juristic literature produced from approximately the 17th to nineteenth centuries. In this article, I examine how of Fez became not only widely practiced but part of the mainstream Mālikī jurisprudential discourse in Morocco. I argue that understanding Islamic law’s mechanisms for discursive stability is critical for its well-established capacity to change through principles like . I do so by analyzing three practices that contravened the prevailing Mālikī rule yet were widely practiced as of Fez: female witnesses for spousal defects, the unilateral shared property sale, and the twelve-person testimony (plus a fourth “counter-example,” the abandonment of the mutual spousal cursing oath (li’an), that reinforces the argument). I pay special attention to jurists’ discursive techniques for entrenching in Mālikī history and precedence in classical substantive Mālikī rules. In the end, I call to acknowledge ’s inextricable status Islamic law in Morocco and beyond.