Settling Disputes among Nomads Settling Disputes among Nomads: Four Fatwās from Early Nineteenth-Century Mauritania

International audience This chapter explores four legal opinions (fatwās) of the Mauritanian jurist al-Qaṣrī b. Muḥammad (d. 1235/1819) from the Nawāzil al-Qaṣrī. Islamic law has typically been an urban discourse produced by scholars based in cities, but from the 17th century onwards, the emergence of nomadic groups specialising in religious studies fostered the spread of Islamic literacy and law in the trans-Saharan region. This rural juristic activity, produced away from the cities and among pastoralist and other non-sedentary groups, differed from that of the urban jurists, and is available in the form of ‘case collections’ (nawāzil), responsa (ajwiba) and archival documents that allow us to write the cultural and social history of pre-colonial West Africa from an insider’s perspective.