Le gouvernement du juge : Ibn 'Abdûn et Séville au début du Xlle siècle

Abstract

This article analyses one of the first treatises on the hisba - the police of the market and manners - that was written by the Sevillian Ibn 'Abdûn at the beginning of the 12th century. In defining the town, Islam is, not surprisingly, the protector of religious law, the precepts of which the Judge (qâdî) and the market magistrate (muhtasib) enforce. What is more unusual is the list of those that this definition excludes : the Jews and Christians ; women, children and peasants, whose sex, age and rusticity prevent them from understanding and respecting legal clauses ; but especially the agents of authority, the Almaravides Berbers, who had been masters of al-Andalus for only a short while and who were regarded with suspicion because of the roughness of their manners and the colour of their skin. The Muslim, masculine, Andalusian city only accepted from foreign worlds that which was necessary for its survival and that was always duly converted : care-giving from the women, fruit from the fields, the armed protection of the Berbers. All that could not be converted was excluded. The Islamic town thereby took on a narrower, but also more aggressively affirmed, identity -in particular vis-à-vis the Prince and the Infidels - than at the beginning of its history.