Before 1044: ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Ṣiqillī on the Purchase of Christian and Muslim Females in Sicily

Abstract

In a legal treatise, known as “Refinement of the Student and the Benefit of the Willing” (Tahḏīb al-ṭālib wa-fāʾidat al-rāġib), the Mālikī Sicilian jurist ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Ṣiqillī recorded a legal discussion between his teacher Abū Bakr and himself that dealt with the purchase of enslaved Christian and Muslim girls. The article uses this discussion not only to shed light on the role played by slavery in Sicily in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century, but also to illustrate the transmediterranean dimensions of legal exchange between and beyond Sicily and Ifrīqiya. Although the Sicilian legal infrastructure was generally indebted to the Qayrawānī jurisprudence, the Sicilian jurists had to develop their own solutions to certain legal issues, as in the case of legal questions arising from the purchase of Christian and Muslim slave girls.