Katherine E. Hoffman

Mirror of the Soul is an interdisciplinary investigation of legal transformations in rural Morocco under the French Protectorate (1912-1956) in light of both colonial designs and Berber community internal struggles over the relationship between legal practice, religion, gender, and collective identity. The project’s methods and analysis draw on ethnography, linguistic anthropology, history, and legal studies, and the data is both archival and oral historical. The archival material is both classified (stored primarily in military archives in Vincennes and diplomatic archives in Nantes) and unclassified (stored in a rural administrative outpost in Morocco established by the French in 1928 and never exploited for scholarship or other purposes). The project brings together these diverse textual sources with oral histories collected in southern Morocco, focusing on the collective memories and biographies of rural Berbers involved in French administration, in the preparation of legal deeds, and in the administration of rural lands just after Independence during which the customary courts had been dissolved for political purposes but no other system had yet replaced them. Of particular importance are the oral renderings of the customary courts, legal process, and administration that have been passed down, and the ways these differ from official accounts in the archival correspondence. Disputes in the customary courts may seem inconsequential – concerning use of a particular plot of land, or inheritance, or disagreement over divorce terms – but collectively they constituted encounters through which law and collective identities began shifting for rural Berbers under French rule and with the consolidation of a Moroccan nation grounded in an Arab identity. The period raises questions as well about the role of custom in Muslim societies across historical periods. Through this micro-study and the macro-level Protectorate policymaking that framed it, information emerges about a previously unstudied judicial institution long considered important for polemic reasons but never examined from the inside, through its practices, or for the ends of its rural and largely impoverished users. The book also examines how “native policy” measures (politique indigène) designed to potentially bolster the Protectorate’s influence instead helped lead to its demise, even while they provided new opportunities for rural women, in particular, to obtain rights long denied them.