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This article presents a case study of A Complaint with the Cadi (Algeria), ca. 1896 - a painting by the French Orientalist artist Marie Lucas-Robiquet (1858-1959). Using cultural and social history as prisms, it explores what Lucas-Robiquet’s visual record communicates to the cultural ‘outsider’ about Muslim social life in French colonial Algeria. Attention is given to this artwork because it depicts the Islamic judiciary system as practised in late nineteenth-century Algeria. This article argues that this painting and its subject matter are rare in the Orientalist canon; that the artist was female, is, I posit, crucial to the ways in which this work can be read. Lucas-Robiquet, a decorated Orientalist, used a Naturalist style of painting which was both nuanced and sensitive to Islamic cultural traditions. I contend that A Complaint with the Cadi (or qāḍī meaning judge) is an important work because it represents a locus of historicised forms of Otherness: the French female artist and the Algerian cultural attribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contribution of the archival records of colonialism in Natal which reveals about the emergence of early forms of regional consciousness among African people. It mentions the imposed administrative system sheptonism which exploit African people to be aware on the loss of autonomy. It also explores the influences of regionalism towards the new forms of regional consciousness.

The article deals with a reform initiated by shariʿa court judges (qadis) in Israel who have facilitated the ability of Muslim women to dissolve an unhappy marriage by the re-interpretation of article 130 of the 1917 Ottoman Law of Family Rights. In analyzing the reform device and motivation, the study elaborates on the qadi's “administration of justice” in a special case of the Muslim minority in Israel as a non-Muslim state. The study unfolds a growing trend of divorce among the Muslim community and the role of women organizations, State institutions, qadis and the Islamic Movement in facilitating a reform as an internal shariʿa-based process of neo-ijtihad from within the shariʿa courts involving processes of modernization, Israelization, Palestinization and Islamization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]