Study of the Construction of Norms Via the Nawāzil of Drugs in Morocco Since Medieval Period.

Drugs are not a recent problem in Morocco. Since the Islamization of the latter, this problem has floated on the Moroccan societal scene where political power and religious power come into line in periods and remain silent in others. To dissect when and how these two powers dealt with the social problems linked to drugs and to highlight their attitudes towards the social practices envisaged in the Moroccan context for centuries, we will use nawāzil, plural of nazila (specific case); it is a branch of fiqh in Islam that belongs to a literary tradition of jurisprudential collections (fatāwās). The nawāzil contain legal provisions relating to new emerging facts, in which there is no direct legal or jurisprudential text or previous interpretation to which they can be applied. The corpora of the nawāzil are normative texts, they belong to the science of law in Islam (the shari’ā). For more understanding, we will shed light on the construction of drugs’ norms in Morocco depending on a historization of these norms so as to move from a normative culturalism to an anthropological normative fact. On the one hand, we will adopt historical anthropology as an approach to raise the socio-economic facts and politico-religious acts relating to drugs in Morocco since medieval period, aiming to disclose the structure of Moroccan society in relation to drugs, and on the other hand, we will discover how the norms relating to drugs were constructed.