In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the role that legal actors who were not necessarily members of the learned circles, and particularly the sovereign (namely, the sultan), played in the administration of law in the Mamluk and the Ottoman context. This paper seeks to join this growing literature by examining the relations between four key concept - kanun, yasa (or yasaq/yasa?), siyasa and siyaset. Commonly, all four concepts have been treated as separate from, and in some cases contrasted to, the law that was formulated by the jurists (shari‘a or fiqh). In any case, the four concepts represent “policy-based” intervention in the administration of law. By looking at the relationship between these concepts as it emerges during the transition from Mamluk to Ottoman rule in Syria and Egypt, I hope to emphasize some important dimensions of these concepts that have not received in my mind sufficient attention in modern historiography. I argue that, in the context of the fifteenth and the sixteenth century (but possibly in earlier and later centuries as well), kanun and yasa on the one hand and siyasa on the other represented different forms of sultanic or “policy-based” legislation. To this end, I am interested in juxtaposing two legal aspects of the conquest that have not been treated as particularly related in modern historiography: the first is the Ottoman recurring reference in the decades following the conquest to the kanun (and, at times,kanunname) of the late fifteenth-century Mamluk sultan Qaytbay (r. 1458-1496); and the second is the denunciation by Arab observers, most of them jurists, of the new Ottoman administrative regulations as yasaq (or yasa), a highly charged, fairly negative, term in the Mamluk context. Each of these aspects of the incorporation of the Arab provinces in the empire reflects a set of sensibilities, the former those of the conquerors and the latter those of the conquered. The different sixteenth-century sensibilities stem from different understandings of the sultanate, the dynasty, and their role in formulating and administering law. While the new rulers tried to introduce the notion of dynastic/sultanic law, a legal corpus that is associated with the sultan and/or dynasty and draws its legitimacy from them, the Arab jurists opposed this notion of law and the implied role it ascribed to the sultan and to the dynasty more generally.