Litigating Subjects

The French colonial state in Algeria constructed and administered a hybrid body of law that mapped French categories, codes, and procedures onto local and sharia-based legal practices. Colonial courtrooms became key sites of encounter and legal transformation, and Muslim litigants developed strategies that enabled them to move between colonial venues of French or Islamic law and non-state spaces of dispute resolution. Litigating Subjects examines the activities of Algeria's Muslim courts toreveal how Algerian subjects both incorporated and subverted colonial legal authorities and thereby exploited the tensions of the colonial state.

Drawing on never-before-accessed Algerian judicial archives, Sarah Ghabrial brings readers into the lived experiences and daily social realities informing law and its making in colonial Algeria. She demonstrates how Algerian women in particular engaged Muslim courts to mobilize vernacular legal practices and practical knowledges. Women litigants responded to the French colonial invention and codification of patriarchal restrictions by maneuvering across jurisdictions and legal norms, including those unseen and unregulated by the state. With close attention to the intersections of local, colonial, and regional discourses within the Muslim courtroom, this book offers methodological and analytic innovations that invite new understandings of law, modernity, and Islam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.