Illicit contact with Christendom forced Islamic jurists into contested legal rationalizations.
Evidence
A similar disagreement between the rigorist and lenient schools of juristic interpretation arises in discussions of the voluntary Muslim visitor to non- Muslim lands. The movement of Muslim merchants, and even the establishment of Muslim communities among the idolaters and polytheists in Asia and Africa, seem to have aroused little or no concern. But the voluntary movement of Mus lims to Christendom, to the lands of the arch-rival of Islam, was another matter. For the most rigorous, there is only one legitimate reason for a Muslim to travel to Christendom, and that is to negotiate the ransoming or exchange of captives. This could be extended into a general license for ambassadors, though it should be noted that the Muslim states, in contrast to the Christian states, established no resident embassies abroad until the end of the eighteenth century, and very few until the nineteenth. The usual practice was to send an ambassador when there was something to say, and to recall him when he had said it. Most of the early Moroccan embassy reports from Europe are headed “Report on a Mission for the Ransoming of Captives” or words to that effect—presumably to avoid possible legal troubles for the ambassador or for the ruler who sent him. … Great numbers did, however, go and settle in Europe in the post-imperial years. Many of them went from former dependencies to the homelands of their former rulers—North Africans to France, south Asians to Britain, Indonesians to Holland, Trans-Caucasians and Central Asians to Russia. But these were not all. There were also many immigrants from countries that had never known imperial rule, notably economic migrants from Turkey and political and religious refugees from Iran. By now there are many millions of Muslim residents in most of the countries of Western Europe, an increasing proportion born and brought up in these countries, with all the expectations to which their birth entitles them and which their education prepares them to demand. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 701
Categorization
- XREF: Complicates Said-adjacent accounts where the West is uniformly the surveilling subject; here Islamic jurisprudence itself gated and policed contact, echoing reciprocity debates in Orientalism scholarship.