announced an interdisciplinary workshop on the legal history of the Ottoman Empire, held in Paris on 26 and 27 May.
My paper aims to
discuss the legal, political and social configuration that shaped the
1877 regulation of idare-i örfiye (or örfi idare), the untranslatable
Ottoman equivalent of the state of siege. First mentioned in the 1876
Constitution and first applied during the Russo-Ottoman War of
1877-1878, the örfi idare consisted in the suspension of the ordinary
legal order in exceptional circumstances. Its scope and modalities of
application were codified in September 1877 by a decree composed of 13
articles. The Ottoman kararname was a case of legal hybridization that
combined the translation of some articles of the 1849 French law on the
“état de siège” and references to the Ottoman political and legal
systems. Relying on the French and Ottoman legal texts, as well as
documents from the military archives in Ankara and the Başbakanlık
archives, I will attempt to analyze this codification of the örfi idare
both as the product of textual encounters and as the result of political
and social dynamics involving a wide range of local, governmental and
foreign actors in the context of the Russo-Ottoman war. I will also
discuss the lack of precision of this regulation on several crucial
aspects, arguing that the confrontation to the social realities did not
only shape the process of codification but also contributed to define
what was to remain unspoken in the law. Theses lacunae left room for
tensions and negotiations between the different parts active in or
affected by the örfi idare, especially the different institutions of the
central government, the provincial military authorities and the foreign
powers. By its contents and its gaps, the 1877 regulation sheds light
on the mechanisms that transformed the örfi idare into a tool of
government for exceptional and (most often) non exceptional times in the
late Ottoman period and, later on, during the Republican era.
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Ahmad Amara, New York University
State Making and Jurisdictional Tensions: The Beersheba Kaza as an Anomalous Legal Zone
Throughout the
process of founding and administering the Beersheba town and kaza (1900)
in southern Palestine, the Ottoman officials had emphasized the
‘special circumstances’ of the region. Their actions and administration
were guided by these circumstances. In 1902 the local administrative
council was allowed to sit as a Court of First Instance (bidayet
mahkemesi). What was applied however, were mostly the local laws and
customs, and the judges serving in the court were local Bedouin sheikhs.
The year after, the şurayı devlet (The Ottoman Council of State)
allowed the council to look also into land dispute cases, to be resolved
also according to tribal local customs. Despite the Ottoman land reform
and attempts to register Bedouin held lands since the 1880s, the şurayı
devlet had justified its decision by the then-existing local practices.
The decision noted that lands in the region were not registered and
land transactions (rehin ve ferağ) were being conducted according to the
local custom and tradition (örf ve âdet), whereas disputes were
resolved through sulh ve hüküm (mediation and ruling). The Ottoman
government sought to make a gradual change in southern Palestine without
imposing its own official laws, and justified its decision by the fact
that the Bedouin were not educated of the judicial rules and laws of the
nizamiye courts.
However, at the
outset questions of law and jurisdiction began to arise. One plaintiff
complained that the nizamiye court in Gaza did not accept appeals on
decisions of the Beersheba council, while another asked the Jerusalem
administrative council to serve as an appeal forum, and a third
plaintiff requested the şurayı devlet to set as a cessation court. In
some cases, both the Jerusalem council and the şurayı devlet looked into
appeals, however their action received some criticism from different
Ottoman departments as being incompatible with the legal provisions. On
the ground, people were conducting forum shopping to achieve their best
results.
The Beersheba
experience represented one case of state-society relationships, which
embodied the tensions and workings between the Ottoman goal to creating
an integrated system of rule and the creation of new accommodating legal
system. Nevertheless, looking into the imperial legal orders, even
after the tanzimat, we see that accommodating legal cultures were not
rare. The jurisdictional tensions signified the complexity of the
socio-economic affairs of the region and its environs, as well as the
shifting understandings and categorizations of specific legal, spatial,
and social realities by governmental and social actors (including
courts, judges, regional governors, tax and land registry staff,
inhabitants and local leaders). The legal culture that had evolved
continued in the post-Ottoman period and impacted the later British
Mandatory judicial system in the region.
(The research
utilizes archival resources from the Ottoman Basbakanlik Archives; the
Israel State Archives; Personal Papers; and Interviews).
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Ebru Aykut, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University
Revisiting the Basic Legal Principles of the Tanzimat in Light of a Customary Practice: House-Burning and Usul-i Cibal
The two of the
fundamental tenets of the Tanzimat’s legal project were the principles
of personal criminal liability and legality according to which no one
could be punished for an act without standing trial and before his/her
guilt was proven in line with the kanun and sharia. This paper aims to
revisit these premises by focusing on a particular local customary
practice that had reportedly been in force since time immemorial among
Albanian highland communities.
Setting fire to the
house of a murderer, who took flight after his act, was part of the
ancient Albanian customary law known as the Kanun of Lek Dukagin or
Usul-i Cibal (Mountain Law). In such cases, fire was a means of
extinguishing collective outrage, an extra-judicial punishment carried
out usually by the village community and warranted by local governments.
The house-burning custom had been outlawed in 1854 by the Ottoman state
for the obvious reason that punishing the innocent families of
murderers along with the perpetrators without due process of law was
against the very principles of the Tanzimat. It should also be recalled
that the punishment for the crime of arson was death penalty according
to the 1858 Penal Code. Nevertheless, the archival evidence suggests
that this custom did not disappear because the killers, in most cases,
could not be captured and arrested and even if they were captured, the
local people preferred a quick restitution of justice by fire without
delay rather than seeking official punishment to be inflicted on the
perpetrator that could take a long time. In other words, the deterrent
and immediate effect of the custom could not be substituted by any other
means and thus, it remained legitimate in the eyes of the local
communities as well as local authorities who had no choice but to
acknowledge its force and benefits to maintain public security and order
in the area.
Focusing on this particular component of the customary
law in the context of nineteenth-century legal reforms, this paper aims
to highlight the complexity of the legal order in the Ottoman Empire
and the role of popular understandings of justice and local dynamics in
shaping the practice of law which did not necessarily require a
consistency with the letter of the law. Not surprisingly, this
inconsistency, or rather the existence of multiple legal spheres in an
era marked by centralization, codification, and standardization efforts,
resulted in contentions between the imperial center and the provincial
governments, but at the same time provided the families of the murderers
with a legitimate ground to raise their voices against the custom and
ask for the implementation of justice in accordance with the kanun and
sharia.
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Hümeyra Bostan, İstanbul Şehir University
New Means of Providing Justice in a Distant Province: Ottoman Judicial Reform in Yemen (1872-1918)
This paper deals
with the introduction of a new judicial organization in the Province of
Yemen after 1872 when the second Ottoman conquest of the region took
place. Examining the ebbs and flows in the process of the establishment
of the new Ottoman court system called the nizamiye courts, I argue that
the Ottoman state did not insist in uniform policies but had
flexibility to use interim formulas to provide for the gradual
transformation of the judicial system of Yemen.
The Ottoman state
transformed gradually its legal organization after the promulgation of
Gülhane Rescript in 1839. A codification of Islamic principles and an
adaptation of Western laws followed along with a new system of courts.
However, the consolidation of the new legal organization in Yemen took
some time. The Ottoman government established nizamiye courts in the
provincial center and in most sub-provinces and districts by 1879.
Because the Yemenis were unaccustomed to applying to courts, the state
reorganized the court system with some modifications and then decided to
abolish the nizamiye courts but sustained the şer‘iyye courts in 1889.
Subsequently, the government transformed the şer‘iyye courts in ways
that authorized them to implement nizami law. This study examines how
“legal reform” was instituted in Yemen and how or to what extent these
new legal categories and institutions facilitated Ottoman rule. This
complicated and multi-dimensional story of the court organization in
Yemen indicates the Ottoman state’s commitment to its principle of
flexibility and toleration in providing justice to all its subjects.
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Omar Y. Cheta, Bard College
“Wakil” and “Avukatu”: On the Politics of Legal Language in Late Ottoman Egypt
This paper is an
attempt to contribute to the study of legal language in the Ottoman
Empire through revising the history of the legal profession in late
Ottoman Egypt.
From the 1830s onwards, the Ottoman Empire witnessed a
period of intense legal transformation. Simultaneously, Egypt, a
largely autonomous province within the Empire, was the site of parallel
legal experiments that resembled those being formulated in the Ottoman
center. In both Istanbul and Cairo, a novel legal infrastructure
consisting of Ottoman and continental European components was being
constructed, elaborated on and frequently revised. This infrastructure
would gradually become the primary field upon which Ottoman subjects, as
well as, in certain cases, foreign residents and travellers, negotiated
the resolution of their disputes in accordance with legally sanctioned
procedures. The language that elucidated the contours and mechanisms of
this infrastructure was marked by tensions between the apparent meanings
of legal concepts and categories, and the meanings of these same
categories as understood and deployed by the numerous individuals who
navigated the sphere of law.
This paper explores this tension
through focusing on the category of “legal practitioners”; a category
that was re-conceptualized during the nineteenth century. Through
systematically exploring the roles carried out by individuals who held
the titles of “wakil” and “avukatu” inside nineteenth courtrooms, the
paper will trace the emergence and transformation of a particular kind
of legal practitioner, namely, the professional lawyer. The geographical
focus of the paper is Cairo, arguably, the alternative center of legal
experimentation in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. In terms of
sources, the paper will draw on both Istanbul and Cairo-issued
legislations, a host of commercial and civil disputes litigated in Cairo
(in both state-enacted courts and European (esp. British) consulates),
as well as contemporaneous commentaries, such as travel accounts and
memoirs.
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Dzovinar Derderian, University of Michigan
Marriage Law as a Site of Resistance, 1840s-1870s
The
multi-confessional setting in the eastern Ottoman provinces provided a
number of legal venues for the local inhabitants to contest the
regulations of their confessional communities. In the proposed paper I
focus on marriage law and ask how and why marriage presented a central
domain for contesting power. During the era of the Tanzimat (1839-1876)
the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul attempted to gain full control of
the Ottoman Armenian Apostolic communities. The centralization of the
patriarchate— linked to the centralization of the Ottoman state—was
challenged in the provinces. Marriage was a domain in which the Istanbul
Patriarchate sought to enforce the letter of the law, but faced
multiple difficulties in doing so. I argue that by regulating marriage
the patriarchate aimed to demarcate ethno-confessional boundaries and
centralize its power in the provinces.
Petitions sent from Van and
Erzurum to the Armenian Patriarchate and the Sublime Porte in Istanbul,
as well as the Armenian Catholicosate in the Russian Empire from the
1840s to the 1870s, constitute the main archival sources of the proposed
paper. I will also examine the reports, decrees, and public discourses
(i.e., periodicals) regarding marriage. In this paper I question how
individuals in the provinces of Erzurum and Van bended the boundaries of
marriage law to resist the centralization of the patriarchate.
Individuals looked for new legal avenues in cases of divorce, marriage
of underage girls, marriage between relatives and limitations on the
number of spouses. The petitions confirm that the Protestants and
Catholic communities, the Kurdish sheikhs and Islamic courts provided
individuals belonging to the Armenian Apostolic Church the opportunities
to challenge their confessional legal boundaries of marriage. The
existence of different centers of the Armenian Church provided an
additional medium for trespassing marriage law. I ask how and why
priests facilitated the violation of the Armenian Church’s marriage law.
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Wolfgang Egner, University of Constanz
The Negotiation of Entangled Law: The Global Context of Ottoman Law in Cyprus
The occupation of
Cyprus by the British Empire established an exceptional case of
international law that had a major impact on the local law in Cyprus. A
contract with the Ottoman Sultan allowed “the Island of Cyprus to be
occupied and administered by England”. In the annex of this convention
the British diplomat Layard accepted to perpetuate the local religious
tribunals. But like in many colonial cases, the British at the same time
wanted to introduce a new law inspired by the Indian code as part of a
larger plan for reforming the island.
Thus the Medjlis-i
Idare was replaced in its legislative function by a new legislative
council that created new laws in Cyprus. But formally the island was
still under Ottoman legislation and for many British lawyers Ottoman law
nonetheless prevailed. The provincial Daavi Courts continued their work
under the British administration but could be overseen by a district
commissioner, who was entitled to overrule the judgment. The High Court
of Justice was established as a new court for foreigners continuing the
dual jurisdiction, but also mixing both jurisdictions by sending cases
in which foreigners accused locals (Ottoman subjects) to the Daavi
courts. There are many more examples for the coexistence of different
legal norms in Cyprus, which created hybrid forms of law and legal
practice.
In this talk I focus on the question of how the local
Ottoman law was shaped by the interconnected system of the British
Empire and by a comparison with other similar cases under foreign
administration such as Bosnia-Hercegovina and Tunisia. The local and
international negotiation process changed the law itself and at times
even to the benefit of local jurisdiction.
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Sami Erdem, İstanbul Şehir University
From Fiqh Book to Legal Text: Revisiting Continuity and Change in the Majalla as a Model for Traditional Content in Modern Form
The Ottoman Majalla
represents the first attempt at a transition from a conception of law
based on fiqh texts to that of law as a codified code in Islamic
history. Codifying a portion of Islamic civil law and consisting of
sixteen chapters, this corpus was prepared by a committee comprised by
fiqh ulema and headed by Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, before being gradually
brought into force between 1869 and 1876. The Majalla was highly
important not just for the Ottomans but also for many Islamic societies
in the formerly-Ottoman territories (most significantly, Egypt) as it
either served as the model for codification, or was directly adopted in
these countries during the 20th century. Although it was abolished in
Turkey in 1926, it continued to function as the main source of
codification in the area of civil law in many other Muslim societies.
Moreover, the Majalla’s significance went beyond codification processes,
influencing experts’ understanding of Islamic fiqh as manifested in the
relevant literature.
This paper revisits
the significance of the Majalla in two inter-related respects. The first
concerns the formal/morphological novelty that the Majalla carried as
an experience/experiment in switching from text-based understanding of
Islamic law to that of legal application based on the idea of codified
law. The committee preparing the corpus presented it as a modern fatwa
collection and a new fiqh text containing the most respected legal
opinions of the Hanafi school, further insisting that it maintained the
traditional assumptions and principles of law in order to avoid the
legitimation problem for this novel form in the eyes of the traditional
ulema. Thus, the Majalla’s formal novelty came to represent the main
reference for later reforms, serving as a model for (re)producing the
traditional content in a modern form.
Secondly, I will examine the
Majalla’s presentation of the notion of “change” as a basis of its
legitimacy as fiqh text with a new form that was compatible with the
modern(izing) society. The idea of change was a highly significant theme
in both the committee reports during the Majalla’s preparation phase
and the narratives of its authors (particularly in Ahmed Cevdet Pasha’s
anecdotes in his memoirs) as well as in its content. However, despite
its bold promises, it failed to satisfy the expectations regarding the
scale and depth of change in modernizing the Ottoman civil law, for it
did not entail concrete and radical propositions or solutions in terms
of the notion of change. Still, however, the very positive attitude
toward “change” and the significance attached to it by the Majalla came
to form the main reference point (and a legitimizing role) for later
codification attempts.
Therefore, this paper discusses the tension
between form and content in the Majalla in terms of the transition from
fiqh text to legal text on the one hand, and the nature and future of
the idea of change in it, paying attention to the interaction between
law makers and socio-political context as well as to the Majalla’s
epistemological references, on the other.
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Yusuf Ziya Karabıçak, McGill University
Greek Associations and Ottoman Legality in Late Nineteenth Century
The first Greek
educational association in the Ottoman Empire was founded in 1861 in
Istanbul. The first Ottoman Law of Associations was promulgated in 1909.
It is hard to imagine that associations, regardless of the community
their founders belonged to, acted in a legal chaos for 48 years. In
fact, they did not. Although there was no law, the associations were
bound and regulated by a certain number of government activities and
discourses that gave them legality in the eyes of Ottoman officials.
These activities and discourses allowed Ottoman officials to permit some
activities while banning others. This paper discusses the ways in which
Greek associations became legal and acceptable in this environment.
Essential elements for this discussion are the words Ottoman official
documentation used to describe associations (cemiyet, kulüp,
biraderlik), the prerequisites the Ottoman officials asked from an
association, and the way they dealt with each case. Legality of
associations in the Ottoman Empire was determined through actions and
correspondences for a very long time. Far from being a non-legal
environment, this was a process of inclusion/exclusion which gave a
freer hand to Ottoman officials and especially to local authorities.
Reading these correspondences will help us reconstruct Ottoman
officials’ expectations to a certain extent.
In this paper, I will
make use of Ottoman documentation surrounding Greek educational and
philanthropic associations from 1860 to 1900s, to examine how Ottoman
officials decided on the legality of public activities and what kind of a
vocabulary they used to talk about it. This work benefits from studies
done by François Georgeon, George A. Vassiadis, Haris Exertzoglou, Nadir
Özbek and others on associations while addressing a hitherto neglected
aspect of these activities: their legality.
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Ceyda Karamürsel, University of Pennsylvania
Race, Ethnicity and the Making of Law in the Post-Circassian Expulsion Ottoman Empire
In 1861, a Nogay
prince named Canpolat, expelled from the Caucasus and settled near
Constanza in today’s Romania, wrote to the Ottoman officials to complain
about the “rebellious behaviour” of his five slaves that he brought
with him. Canpolat Bey was one of many Caucasian noblemen who were
dislocated from their native Caucasus lands during the Russo-Circassian
war and settled in the Ottoman domains. Like many other Caucasian slave
holders at the time, he sought ways to suppress his slaves’ pursuit of
freedom, inspired particularly by the abolition of trade in African
slaves effected a few years prior. When Canpolat Bey submitted his
formal complaint however, he was asked to pay a pençik tax for the
slaves he owned. Utterly perplexed, he objected, claiming that pençik
tax was not known to them in their native lands in Kuban. Nor was his
ownership of the slaves a Şer‘i matter, he contended, which could be
litigated or settled at the court, for in Canpolat Bey’s "transplanted"
perception of law, his ownership of his slaves was regulated primarily
by customary law, known as adat in the Caucasus. His slaves were either
obtained through such practices as blood money, princely plunder or were
inherited from his family, whereas for the Ottoman state, slavery was
regulated by Şer‘i law, and accordingly slave or free status were
determined at the Şer‘i courts. For the slaves themselves, on the other
hand, it was a whole different matter, which had the newly emerging
international anti-slavery law as its focus that had already effectively
bent Şer‘i law and brought an end to the trade in African slaves. If
the Şer‘i law could be abrogated once for the African slaves, why would
it not bend for the Circassians? Using Ottoman state archives, court
records and British consular documents, this paper aims to explore how
different legal systems interplayed with or worked against each other in
determining the limits of slavery and freedom, which concomitantly
delineated the categories of race and ethnicity more explicitly in the
late Ottoman Empire.
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Aylin Koçunyan, CETOBAC, EHESS
French Impact on the Legal Transformation of the Millet System in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1865
The Crimean War
(1853-56) had an important impact on the transformation and
institutionalization of the millet-system in the Ottoman Empire. The
conflict broke out due to a dispute between Catholic and Orthodox clergy
over the control of the Holy Places in Palestine and triggered the
religious clientelism of the Great Powers. In order to preserve its
sovereignty in the governance of non-Muslim communities, the Ottoman
state had to conceive a new legal framework that would guarantee their
religious freedom and privileges. Hence, community regulations were
proclaimed by the Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish communities in the
period extending from 1862 to 1865. Another consequence of the Crimean
War was the admission of the Ottoman Empire to the Concert of Europe, a
process which necessitated the conciliation of the principles governing
the Ottoman/non-Muslim communal sphere with those of their European
counterparts. The project pays attention to the restructuration of the
Ottoman Armenian and Jewish communities in a period that followed the
Crimean War and the promulgation of the 1856 Reform Decree, which
invited them to revise their community regulations. On the one hand, it
tries to reconstruct the impact of the French consistorial system (a
body created in1808 by Napoleon I and governing the Jewish congregations
of France) on the transformation of the Ottoman Jewish community in the
1860s and the agency of the transnational communal networks behind the
process. On the other hand, it shows how the Armenian intelligentsia
which drafted the Armenian regulation tried to adapt the elements of
French constitutionalism to the Ottoman context for the administration
of their communal sphere. The research combines many sources including
the Ottoman Archives, the French national and diplomatic archives, those
of the Alliance israélite universelle and of the Israelite Central
Consistory of France and of the Bibliothèque Noubar.
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Ileana Moroni, University of Basel
The Parliament as Law-Maker in the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the 1908 Revolution
In this paper, I will discuss the Parliament as law-maker during the first year of the Second Constitutional Period, 1908-09.
The 1908 revolution
profoundly affects the Ottoman political system. Following the
restoration of the 1876 Constitution, and the opening of the newly
elected Parliament in December 1908, sovereignty is transferred from the
sultan to the nation, and the Parliament becomes the key political
institution of this period. Even though the influence of
extra-parliamentary and extra-legal methods, as well of as of social
dynamics, on the law-making process, should not be downplayed, laws are
henceforth discussed and decided upon in the Parliament, a
representative institution which asserts sovereignty in the name of the
nation, and which utterly also defines the limits of legitimacy in the
new political system.
I will first briefly present the conditions
within which the Parliament is convened, how deputies are elected, and
what the prerogatives of this legislative body are, according to the
1876 Constitution. Then, I will examine within which conditions, through
which procedures, and based on which precepts the Ottoman Parliament
acts as a legislator. Deputies see their assembly as a revolutionary
Parliament; in addition, more than on the letter of the Constitution and
on the Parliament's internal regulation, they base their practice and
their arguments on what they call the “spirit” of the constitutional
regime, on European examples, as well as on the need to act swiftly in
order to safeguard “order”, “unity” (key concepts in their discourse),
and, utterly, the nation.
Thus, even though law-making is now
supposed to rely on the written rules set by the Constitution,
parliamentary practice points, more than to rule of law, to a kind of
“state of exception” in which a “revolutionary” Parliament is allowed to
make whatever decisions it sees fit for the “salvation of the nation”.
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Fatma Öncel, Boğaziçi University
Law and Struggle in Ottoman Rural Society: Çiftliks of Trikala
In this paper, I
propose to discuss the making of law regarding land and property in the
Ottoman countryside during the nineteenth century. As a part of my PhD
research, I intend to focus on competing legal and social claims on
agrarian lands in the Ottoman Balkans. Challenging the normative
approaches to law, I will discuss the relationship between legal and
social spheres both in conceptual and empirical means. Conceptually, an
institutional approach to the making of nineteenth-century Ottoman land
law is proposed based on the idea of legal pluralism; as the interests
of competing social groups were institutionalized within multiple legal
claims. Making of law is regarded here as an institution with its own
dynamics, transcending legal reforms of the period. Also from a
revisionist class-based analysis, I will discuss the mutual reproduction
of law and society. Empirically, I intend to show the coexistence and
competition between different legal claims on land raised by the
peasantry, local nobility, and centralising state power. For that
purpose, I examine a number of çiftliks at Trikala (Thessaly, Greece)
during c. 1820s-1870s. These çiftliks belonged to different legal
frameworks as miri and vakıf, and their records (“defters”) were kept
for various purposes, such as enlisting possessions and revenues of
çiftliks after confiscations, or account books comparing claims of
peasants and vakıf deputies. These records included extensive
information about land and about people working on it. Moreover, they
presented details of contracts between peasants and landlords, and
obligations of landlords to the central authorities. Therefore, I intend
to highlight differences of legal claims in two layers; first, the ones
due to rent and labour relations within çiftliks; and second, the ones
due to legal status of çiftlik lands.
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Christian Sassmannshausen, Freie Universität
When the Court Visited Home: Legal Out-of-Court Sessions and the Manzūl in Late Ottoman Tripoli
The making of law in
the Ottoman Empire was a complex process based on various legal
sources, institutions, and practices on both the imperial and local
level. Nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms further differentiated the
legal landscape, adjusting the basis of law, its institutions and
establishing at least nominal legal equality of all citizens. Yet for
all we know about Ottoman law on a theoretical level, we know remarkably
little about how it actually worked in practice.
This paper focuses
on local legal spaces and their interplay with the Islamic court in late
Ottoman Tripoli (Greater Syria). In out-of-court sessions held mostly
in manzūls, the reception halls of Muslim and Non-Muslim families,
petitioners from very different social backgrounds (often from the same
mahalle) settled a variety of legal cases. These out-of-court sessions,
although still held under the auspices of the Islamic court, were led
not by the judge but by the local court scribe (kātib). As such, the
manzūl functioned as an exclusively local legal space, attended by a
local kātib functioning as a judge, the hosts of the manzūl as well as
local petitioners and witnesses. What’s more, most of the scribes in
charge of such sessions were sons or close relatives of influential
hosts of the reception halls. These semi-private court sessions, held in
almost every quarter of the city, thus constituted a complementary
legal space that excluded externally-appointed judges in favor of
locally based court scribes with close ties to the manzūl’s hosts. As
such, imperial policies in the legal sphere intending to contain the
accumulation of local power – in this case, the more frequent rotation
of judges – were incorporated into pre-existing forms of mediation
outside of the court. Out-of-court sessions allowed the hosts of manzūls
to safeguard particular legal decisions in the city. This strengthened
the influence of informal mediation and allowed for the application of
local notions of justice. The importance and longevity of these
complementary legal spaces gives us new insight into the many layers of
Ottoman legal culture and offer a new paradigm for how we understand
local legal culture in practice.
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William Smiley, Princeton University
Sovereignty, Sharia, and the Şeyhülislam in the Age of Revolutions
This paper takes up
the relationship between political power and legal authority in the
tumultuous decades that followed Selim III’s Nizam-ı Cedid reforms, but
preceded the sweeping legal reforms of the Tanzimat. In this period, the
Ottoman state was faced with internal turmoil throughout the Balkans,
most notably in Serbia and Greece. The state responded by elaborating
and applying the Hanafi law of rebellion to draw shifting lines between
those who could and could not be killed and enslaved. At the same time,
the state asserted, in the context of international diplomacy, that
these rebellions were strictly within the Ottomans’ own sovereign
jurisdiction. Both state assertions and juristic opinions were
constructed with attention to the Islamic legal tradition, the gendered
economies of Ottoman slavery, military necessities, and diplomatic
considerations.
The paper traces the interplay between these
factors, in order to untangle how political motivations informed, but
were also shaped by, Islamic legal reasoning. Ultimately, I argue, the
Ottomans redefined Islamic law to fit this moment—but did so within
certain boundaries, themselves set by the legal tradition. The paper
draws on a number of fetvas, on imperial orders invoking them, and on
rescripts (Hatt-ı Hümayuns), all from the Başbakanlık archives, as well
as on diplomatic correspondence from the British National Archives.
In telling this story, the paper aims to challenge common assumptions
about the relationship between şeyhülislams and sultans, and more
broadly, between the Islamic legal tradition and political authorities.
At the same time, it situates the Ottoman Empire in the broader global
context of the “Age of Revolutions,” arguing that the new definitions of
sovereignty the Ottomans articulated through Islamic law had much in
common with concepts of international law that emerged from the Atlantic
World amidst North and South American independence movements and the
U.S. Civil War.
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İlkay Yılmaz, Istanbul University
Stamping the Outsider Subjects Inside: The Passport Regulations in the Hamidian Period
This paper aims at
analyzing the international (1884 and 1894) and internal (1887) passport
(mürür tezkeresi) regulations which are highly indicative of the
political elite’s perception of security as well as the emerging
infrastructural power tools of the modern state. The study tries to
explain the disciplinary modern power mechanisms developed by the
Ottoman political elite through the analysis of the administrative
practices and regulations on geographical mobilization in everyday life
as surveillance techniques.
In the Hamidian Era
(1876-1908) the geographical mobilization is one of the burning issues
of the Ottoman political elite as a part of security policies. The new
threat perceptions of the political elites, mainly based on political
problems, directed their attention to the Armenians, Bulgarians,
seasonal workers, foreign workers and members of secret societies.
Besides this, the new legislative and administrative security reforms
are also influenced by the anarchist fear in Europe and the
anti-anarchist regulations against “propaganda by deed”.
The threat
perceptions thus shaped the security discourse of the political center.
The new articulations of “vagrant” (serseri) and “mischief” (fesad)
create a discursive link to pejorative understandings of “anarchism” and
“anarchist” in official correspondences. This security discourse also
refers to the concept of social order and the pan-Islamic discourse of
the Hamidian regime that is disseminated to obtain legitimacy in
domestic and international spheres. It also refers to the security
ideology which dwells on the intention of unifying the Empire against
“internal and external enemies”. The aim of the study consists in
examining the relation between these emergent threat perceptions of the
political center and the new regulations on geographical mobilization.
