Overview

When modern debates about Islamic law and women’s rights make headlines, they often overlook centuries of history where Muslim women actively engaged with and shaped Islamic legal traditions. In Living Law, Rosemary Admiral reveals how women in premodern Morocco weren’t merely subjects of Islamic law—they were savvy legal actors who used religious courts and scholarly opinions to advocate for their rights and protect their interests. Drawing on a rich collection of fatwas (legal opinions) from the Maliki school of Islamic law, Admiral reconstructs a world where women negotiated marriage contracts, secured their financial futures, and built partnerships that aligned with their vision of family life. These women, though not formally trained as legal scholars, displayed sophisticated knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence and skillfully navigated the legal system to achieve their goals. Living Law offers an interdisciplinary perspective that challenges simplistic narratives about gender and Islamic law. Admiral demonstrates how the Maliki legal tradition in Morocco—a region that remained outside Ottoman control—provided women with tools to renegotiate their rights through contract stipulations and consultations with local scholars. The result is a nuanced portrait of how Islamic law functioned not as an unchangeable divine mandate, but as a living tradition shaped by the communities it served.

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9780815611844

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Reviews

""A fascinating story that provides new layers to legal studies and women’s history as well as gender relationships. It shows how women managed to challenge the system of their subjugation in ways that are revealing about their capacity to adapt to constraining structural factors and show the power of women’s agency in pre-modern North Africa."" - Driss Maghraoui, editor of Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco ""A pioneering, deeply-researched, thoughtful analysis of how everyday Islamic law functioned in fourteenth and fifteenth century Northwest Africa. . . . Admiral’s work is also invaluable for expanding the horizons of Islamic legal studies towards thirteenth-fifteenth century Morocco and the rich archive of historical and legal sources which demand further exploration."" - Asma Sayeed, author of Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam

Author Information

Rosemary Admiral is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research interests include Islamic legal studies, premodern North African history, and gender and feminism.

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