Qadi Records from Barawe, Shards of History on the Horn of Africa

Author: Yusuf Abukar

Sharia court records have emerged as a rich source of economic, social, and cultural histories of various Muslim communities from the Ottomans to Zanzibaris, from the Egyptians to the Malays. As records of civil and criminal cases, they are vast treasure troves of day-to-day transactions, relations, concerns, and desires of individuals and communities. Scholars have used court registers, also known as qadi records, as primary sources to examine directly social life in Islamic societies, for instance in various Ottoman provinces such as Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, and the Balkans. More recently, scholars have also turned to qadi records to study the application of Islamic law at the local level.

This paper introduces court records from Barawe, in Somalia, as the latest addition to the burgeoning legal archives used as a primary source in the study of Islamic societies. Discovered in 1984 and published in 2007 in two volumes called Servants of Sharia, the records span through the last decade of the 19th century, from 1893 to 1900, which also are the first seven years of Italian colonialism in the country. In addition to being records of local application of Islamic law by civil magistrates, the registers are also a record of urban life, epochal transition and colonial capitalism. Most importantly, Barawe's records show Muslim magistrates engaged in interpretive application of Islamic jurisprudence. They unveil the practice of Sharia as normative law and as an administrative instrument that strive to organize society.