Based upon his observations of the court of Sefrou in the 1960s and 1970s, Rosen has argued that the primary function of the qāḍī was to place litigants back in a position in which they could negotiate the terms of their relationship. Rosen's observation is an important one, albeit overstated. The interest of Muslim jurists in restoring social harmony cannot be viewed in isolation from their mandate to apply the law. The relationship between law and social harmony manifests itself dramatically in the case to be examined in the present chapter: a father and son living in Tlemcen in the middle of the ninth/fifteenth Century were accused of slandering several distinguished sharīfs and defaming the Prophet Muhammad. In his artful and carefully crafted opinion, the Jurist who was called upon to resolve the dispute defused a potentially explosive Situation by seeking a middle position between the “extremists of the hour.” Lacing his opinion with citations from the Qur'ān and ḥadīth that make repeated references to love, forgiveness, repentance, and humility, the muftī transformed a case that might easily have yielded the death penalty into a Statement about how sharīfs and non-sharīfs should relate to one another