32

The promulgation of the French Civil Code in the colony of Senegal in 1830 prompted the Muslim notables in Saint‑Louis to submit more than ten petitions demanding the establishment of a Muslim court. After nearly three decades of negotiations, the colonial administration conceded in 1857, hoping to secure the support of Muslim elites for its expansionist agenda. This article conducts a serial analysis of these bilingual petitions: it seeks to identify the signatories, compares the Arabic and French versions, and examines the conditions of both the production and reception of the texts. These requests are a rare testimony to the colonized voice in the colonial archives that reveal both the capacity for mobilization of the Muslim community and its decisive role in the genesis of a colonial Muslim legal system. They are nonetheless hybrid cultural artefacts born of the colonial encounter: they showcase the strategic appropriation of French political tools and vocabulary, the adaptation of Islamic legal norms to make them intelligible to colonial rulers, and the partial reinvention of the Muslim legal tradition amid the rapid spread of Islam in Senegambia and the growing Islamic identity of Saint‑Louis.