Prohibiting the Pilgrimage: Politics and Fiction in Mālikī Fatwās

Abstract

This study inventories and analyzes Mālikī legal opinions (fatwās) discouraging or prohibiting the pilgrimage to Mecca (the ḥajj) for Muslims in the Islamic West (al-Andalus, North Africa, and West Africa) from the eleventh through nineteenth centuries. This distinctively Mālikī discourse initially may have reflected the risks of long-distance travel from the western periphery to the central Islamic lands. From the twelfth century, most of these texts reflect a ruler’s unstated desire to keep his subjects and their resources at home. Jurists produced fatwās that justified in religious legal terms a regional dispensation from, or even prohibition of, the ḥajj; that masked the political motives for doing so; and that the lay public could grasp readily. The crafting of such complex opinions is explored, including the use of two “fictional” elements: dissemblance, or a discrepancy between the jurists’ actual and stated rationales, and the use of imaginative stories as illustrative aids.