Magic and Religion in North Africa

To keep this character for it, we have not shied away from explanations of a general order, and, regarding strictly Muslim and African questions, we have sought to indicate the broad outlines of the scientific problems to which they are linked. For this part of our book, we have been careful to refer, not to the sources, which would have been misplaced, but to the classic works on the subject.

For Muslim questions, on the contrary, we have cited sources; but given their abundance and the extent of the work to be carried out, we have provisionally limited ourselves. Regarding Muslim orthodoxy, we have cited the Quran the central religious text of Islam and, for the tradition, the collection of Bukhari the most authentic collection of Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, almost exclusively known in North Africa, with its best-known commentator, Qast’allani a 15th-century Egyptian scholar of Hadith; for law, we have hardly considered anything but the Maliki one of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence school, the only one followed in our lands, and we have referred above all to the summary of Khalil a prominent 14th-century Maliki jurist, with its habitual commentators.

It is known that Khalil is the great legal authority of North Africa; we have always cited translations, as well as important secondary works. Regarding folklore, we have made note of our personal observations and the current scientific literature of the Maghrib North Africa. We even hope that our notes will present a fairly complete table of this literature, and this may be our excuse for having multiplied them. We have had the concern of giving the reader a bibliography special to our subject and the most indispensable indications of general sociology. However, we have carefully eliminated useless references: for example, when the bibliography of a subject has already been given in another...