Le Mariage dans les pays musulmans, particulièrement en Tunisie, en Algérie, et dans le Soudan

Second edition, issued in a limited printing of 75 copies.

Restored unlettered spine, wrappers somewhat soiled, a few light foxing spots.

This work, the first of the three-part series Le Mariage indigène dans les colonies et les protectorats de la France, stands apart from the usual writings of magistrate Claude-Arthur Daguin (1849-1944), whose publications had previously focused almost exclusively on Nogent-en-Bassigny and its surrounding region.

An exceptionally rare contribution by a colonial magistrate specialising in Islamic law, printed in only 75 copies and introduced by an epigraph that turns the colonial perspective on its head.

Claude-Arthur Daguin (Nogent-en-Bassigny, 1849 – Astaffort, 1944) was a magistrate, Officer of Public Instruction, Officer of the Tunisian Order of the Nichan Iftikhar, and Knight of the Order of the Dragon of Annam. This succession of colonial distinctions alone reflects the breadth of a career pursued successively in Indochina and North Africa. Serving alternately in Tunisia and Algeria, he devoted an extensive body of legal scholarship to land law, procedure before indigenous courts, the jurisdiction of qadis, and the legal status of state-owned lands.

This work, the opening volume of a trilogy devoted to marriage in Islamic law, first appeared in 1906 before being reissued in this second edition of 1907, published in Paris by Lucien Dorbon, bookseller on rue de Seine, in a strictly limited edition of only 75 copies. Its rarity was inherent to the publication itself, which was intended for a select readership of specialists and practitioners of colonial law.

The epigraph chosen by Daguin is remarkable in more than one respect. Taken from a speech delivered before the Chamber of Deputies on 7 June 1901 by Deputy Marchal, it states that

« la législation musulmane constitue à la femme une situation certainement supérieure au point de vue juridique » et que « la femme associée, entrant en ménage, garde sa personnalité, la propriété de ses biens, le droit de les administrer sans l’autorisation de son mari »

At the time, these very rights were denied to French women under the Napoleonic Civil Code. From the outset, the epigraph places the work under an unexpected light: rather than expressing the colonial contempt commonly directed at indigenous law, it adopts a comparative perspective that acknowledges the legal superiority of a system which the colonial administration was otherwise endeavouring to circumscribe.

The text opens with the juridical and canonical classification of marriage in Islam, according to which marriage may be obligatory, recommended, or prohibited depending on the particular circumstances of the believer.

 Throughout the footnotes, the author displays a wide-ranging comparative scholarship extending from Hebrew law to the Lex Julia et Papia Poppaea of ancient Rome.