Colonial Law and Muslim Law

The essay addresses the problem of colonialism through two perspectives: the analysis of colonial law, and the colonial legacy both in the colonies that gained independence and in the colonizing countries. Colonial law is considered in its three components - metropolitan law, special law and local law - and through the colonial encounter with the law of the colonial power. The analysis of the Algerian case is particularly significant, as it shows the imposition of the categories of French law on local Muslim law, particularly in the field of property law. The Muslim law of personal status was instead maintained and considered a transitional law destined to dissolve through a process of assimilation into French law. The ideology of assimilation - through which the will to affirm the superiority of the colonizer is expressed - persists in the reality of contemporary France and represents the continuity of the ideology of colonial rule in the current reality of a previous colonial power. But the colonial legacy is also manifested in the persistence of the institutional structure of the colony in the form of the subsequent national State after the conquest of the independence in the period of decolonization. In particular the centralized structure of the French administrative State was imposed in Algeria to a social and cultural reality completely extraneous to it, and this contrast can perhaps explain the difficulty of the process towards democracy.