Racial myth, colonial reform, and the invention of customary law in Morocco, 1912–1930

Abstract

Throughout the period of French indirect rule in Morocco (1912–56), colonial scholars and administrators generated a mass of literature to explain the perceived differences between Arab and so-called Berber (Amazeeri) societies. In the minds of many colonial enthusiasts, objective ethnic difference translated into a series of clear social, cultural, and political traits that had divided the indigenous populations for centuries. Historians of the period have highlighted this ethnographic focus as one of the preeminent justifications for French reforms in Morocco. The reform and institutionalisation of customary Berber law, which provoked the most widespread urban protest in nearly two decades, has long been understood as an example of legislative overreaching: the vibrant popular reactions to the so-called Berber dahir of 1930 signalled to many contemporary actors and subsequent historians the veritable birth of the Moroccan nationalist movement, as urban populations protested the what they saw as the diminution of the sultan's jurisdiction and the attenuation of shari‘a in many rural areas. Implicit in this narrative is the idea that by 1930 the otherwise cautious and informed process of ethnically specific reform somehow went awry. This article seeks to demonstrate that the French legal reform program was, from its inception, founded upon vague, contested understandings of Berber social and political organisation that colonial administrators mobilised for very specific political ends. The so-called reform of Berber customary law was rather an invention of a system that French administrators used to remove the Berber population from the influence of the Arab makhzan, to marginalise religious law in favour of secular European values, and ultimately to fracture the network of social, cultural, and political relationships between the sultan and his people. Understanding the manipulative bases of legal reform sheds light on the relationship between the human sciences and colonial policy – specifically the complicated strength and malleability of scholarly mythmaking – and underscores the paradoxes of the French ‘civilising mission’.