BOOK: Avi RUBIN, Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial: the Yildiz Case [Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East] (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2018), ISBN 978-0-8156-3597-0, 60 USD

(image source: Legal History Blog)

Book abstract:

In 1876, a recently dethroned sultan, Abdülaziz, was found dead in his chambers, the veins in his arm slashed. Five years later, a group of Ottoman senior officials stood a criminal trial and were found guilty for complicity in his murder. Among the defendants was the world-famous statesman former Grand Vizier and reformer Ahmed Midhat Paşa, a political foe of the autocratic sultan Abdülhamit II, who succeeded Abdülaziz and ruled the empire for thirtythree years. The alleged murder of the former sultan and the trial that ensued were political dramas that captivated audiences both domestically and internationally. The high-profile personalities involved, the international politics at stake, and the intense newspaper coverage all rendered the trial an historic event, but the question of whether the sultan was murdered or committed suicide remains a mystery that continues to be relevant in Turkey today. Drawing upon a wide range of narrative and archival sources, Rubin explores the famous yet understudied trial and its representations in contemporary public discourse and subsequent historiography. Through the reconstruction and analysis of various aspects of the trial, Rubin identifies the emergence of a new culture of legalism that sustained the first modern political trial in the history of the Middle East.

On the author:

Avi Rubin is senior lecturer in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity. 

Praise:

"A tour de force of socio-legal history of the late Ottoman Empire. Rubin leads the reader into a breathtaking journey through the history and historiography of one of the most serious political crises in late Ottoman history, the Yildiz Trial (1881), turning it into a thrilling microhistory."—Iris Agmon, author of Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine"; A fascinating and detailed micro-history of the trial of Midhat Paşa."—James E. Baldwin, author of Islamic Law and Empire in Ottoman Cairo 

More information with the publisher.