The Persistence of the Customary: French and Zawi Reformism of Islamic Law in the Colonial Encounter in Mauritania, 1900–30

Colonial intermediaries are sometimes seen as career-driven and self-promoting pragmatists. While this emphasizes the colonial moment in which these intermediaries found themselves, it can de-emphasize the ideological and social dimension of their careerism. The rise of Zawi collaborators in colonial Mauritania add details to the motives and self-understanding of colonial intermediaries. In the pre-colonial period, many Islamic reformers and religious leaders criticized the political and legal status of Islam in Western Sahara. As French orientalism developed a more complicated understanding of the sociology of Islam by the late 19^th century, colonial strategists pondered the idea of an autonomous Islam in the service of the colonial order. The colonial intermediaries that filled this gap, qadis, interpreters, scribes, and traders, drew on Islamic discursive strategies in their cooperation with French authorities. At the heart of this encounter were ideas of law, custom and governance. Many Zawi elites decried the symbiosis of Islam and local customs and rejected the practices of qadis. Their critique found receptive French ears. The subsequent revamp of the legal order carved different spaces for Islamic and customary judges and leaders, eventually creating a gap between Islam and tradition. In this paper, I focus on the orders of conceptualizing and reconstructing Islamic justice in a collaborative colonial setting. I first survey the colonial and Islamic critique of the hegemony of the “customary” of the “Islamic”. Second, I examine the colonial reconstruction of the justice system. Third, I show how the new juridical order subsumed and made use of the “customary,” even though under new discursive articulations.