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.

This chapter concerns the 1435/2014 IS booklet on slave-concubinage, al-Sabī: Aḥkām wa-Masāʾil, probably authored by the group’s jurisconsult (muftī), Turkī al-Binʿalī (d. 1438/2017). The text was widely disseminated online when first published, attracting much comment in the international press. In the section excerpted here, al-Binʿalī focuses on the permissibility of taking female pagans as slave-concubines. While premodern Sunnī jurists had typically permitted female People of the Book (i.e. Kitābiyyāt, Jews and Christians) as sexual partners for male Muslims living in the Muslim polity, whether through marriage or slave-concubinage, they were almost unanimous in prohibiting such unions with Zoroastrians and other religious groups. Based on largely historical considerations, and adducing the views of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751/1350) and al-Shawkānī (d. 1250/1834) as proof, al-Binʿalī undermines the classical Sunnī view that female pagans are unlawful as slave-concubines.