Historians as well as Ottoman jurists often conceptualized Ottoman legislation as emanating from three distinct sources: “custom”, “Islamic law/Shari’a”, and “secular/state law.” This understanding has contributed to analyses of processes of modernization and secularization in Ottoman legal history. This paper will explore the constant blending of these sources in various legal arenas vying for control over the administration of property in the late nineteenth century. Using records from the Shari’a court as well as the tapu administration of one district of Ottoman Syria, I will analyze the ways in which nineteenth century land legislation relied on Shari’a concepts in a project to legalize existing practices of land tenure defined as customary, at the same time that it sought to legitimate expanding the bureaucratic state’s power to sanction control over land. I will show how this blending can be read both in relevant legislation and in the tapu registers and Shari’a court transactions that found their legitimacy in such legislation. At the same time, this paper will argue that the multiplicity of legal arenas in which this blending occurred in the late nineteenth century represents a contestation over the power to legitimate land control. The Shari’a Courts and the newly formed tapu offices both sanctioned control over land in late Ottoman Syria, even as provincial and central bureaucrats aimed to more precisely define their roles. This contested pluralism provided legal opportunities for Ottomans from all walks of life to assert their control over property. However, the central state was also able to legitimate its project to obtain land for its own purposes, in this case the settlement of refugees and the expansion of the land holdings of the Hamidian private treasury. The paper will therefore argue for conceptualizing legal change as a reflection of local and imperial struggles over legitimacy.

According to one view, most Tanzimat Period (1839-76) reforms failed because a weak, patrimonial state could not achieve its will by fiat. Yet, the Tanzimat was not a futile exercise in centralization. The impact of reforms was greater than the sum of its parts, and one gets an entirely different view of them from the ground up. A critical examination of local ?er‘î court records indicates that a dialectic existed between the central state and provincials about the nature of property relations, local administration, and civil rights. This presentation would show how this process played out in the ?er‘î court of Tokat in the later Tanzimat and early Hamidian years (c. 1860 – c.1880). The central state learned to ask Tokat’s notables to countenance modest new powers for its bureaucratic branch managers in exchange for prestigious official titles, powerful administrative roles, and lucrative property deeds. Furthermore, the state deferred the specifics of rule making to local deliberative bodies. In all this, local leaders recalibrated events to suit both their narrow corporate interests and broader collective ones. Such a reallignment of provicial milieu was in tune with the strategic interests of the state, because prestigious notables could bring with them with them the support of household retinues, clientele networks, and sometimes whole villages and towns. The study would be in keeping with the aims of your panel. Many have presumed that the Ottoman sultanate held a mythic prestige among subjects of the realm. Moreover, this assumption allowed statist thinkers to label ex officio provincial notables as illegitimate usurpers and interlopers out of hand. Yet, the state’s struggles to reform imply that early on it had failed to cloak legislation within the “legitimate” sanction of notables. The Tanzimat represented a new compact between two normative orders of legality: the theoretical legitimacy of the sultan and the actual power of notables. Ultimately, a new constellation of power relations emerged across the empire, and the period ushered in a new era of participatory politics in the modern Middle East.

This paper challenges the conventional emphasis on Ottoman law, legality, and legitimacy as subjects of elite discourse or the results of elite endeavor, be these elites state agents or their non-state counterparts spread throughout the empire. Most would now accept that law, in any context, is not merely the byproduct of juristic determination or ruling fiat; instead, those subject to the law, those meant to be governed by it, influence its nature in varying and ongoing ways. This paper attempts to bring this mass audience for Ottoman law fully into a discussion of how the law was enacted and how its meanings for a wider public might be accessed. I will investigate—using law codes, law court records, legal formularies, and local literature from the late-Mamluk and early-Ottoman Arabic-speaking world—how Ottoman law-making showed awareness of a need to reach beyond the elite. A critical issue involves the law’s inscription or codification in a situation of indeterminate mass literacy. Accordingly, the paper will examine the practical (and performative) mechanisms of promulgation and enforcement, and their limits. And it will explore the use of written documents as legal artifacts or talismans, important in their physical nature as much for the textual meanings they contain. A key hermeneutical adjustment will be toward a more expansive understanding of “literacy” (following much recent work in New Literacy Studies). Just as law did not originate at the top or center and move from there unidirectionally, nor was literacy an elite or educated preserve. The study will note topics such as forgery and document manipulation and madhhab identities for their broader implications. I will show that the salience and dynamism of Ottoman law-making, especially during this iconic period of imperial formation, was not simply the result of elite ingenuity but was responding to deep-rooted trends in both legal history and evolving mass literacy.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that law and legal institutions were crucial mediators in the relationship between the early modern Ottoman state and its subjects. However, scholars have paid far less attention to the role of law in framing the relationships between the Sultan and the ruling elite that exercised his power. This paper examines the legal consequences of the deposition of the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Defterdar Ahmed Pasha, by the Cairo soldiery in 1675. This incident demonstrates a profound transformation in the relationship between the Ottoman government and the provincial Egyptian elite, which saw law and legal institutions play an increasing prominent role in politics. Defterdar Ahmed Pasha was violently deposed after attempting to implement a package of fiscal and administrative reforms that threatened the interests of the soldiers and notables. Fascinatingly, after deposing the governor by force, a group of soldiers launched a lawsuit in a Cairo shari‘a court that aimed to place limits on the actions of future governors. The hujja issued by the judge at the conclusion of this lawsuit survives at the Basbakanlik Archive in Istanbul; my paper is based on a close reading of this hujja, which I contextualize using accounts of the deposition in a range of contemporary Arabic and Turkish chronicles. I argue that the soldiers who launched this lawsuit displayed a constitutional sensibility, believing that their relationship with the Ottoman government was regulated by law, and that there were rules according to which government should function. I show how the soldiers used an Islamic legal procedure, and an appeal to the authority of custom, to claim for themselves the right to define important aspects of public law: the way that the Ottoman governor should interact with the Egyptian establishment, and the particular officials who should be involved in negotiating policies. I suggest that this incident represents a particular moment during the development of an early modern Ottoman concept of the rule of law.

The fisheries management in the Ottoman Empire was a neglected subject in the Ottoman historiography. Except for Karekin Deveciyan’s Pêche et Pêcheries en Turquie published in 1926 (the book was first published in 1915 in Ottoman Turkish titled Türkiye’de Bal?k ve Bal?kç?l?k), there was generally a lack of interest with the management of Ottoman fisheries. With a careful reading of this book and other archival sources, I will try to shed light on the management of fisheries in Istanbul, the rules and regulations concerning fisheries, taxation of fish resources, and traditional management of provincial fisheries. This general assessment of the fisheries’ management in the Ottoman Empire will be supported by looking at a specific case in the Lake Karla of the district of T?rhala (Trikkala) during the first half of the nineteenth century. The case is about the conflict among local villages for setting up independent fisheries on Lake Karla, where only the villagers of Kanalia claimed ownership rights. Fishing was used to be the main activity in Kanalia until it was drained between 1960 and 2000. The people of Kanalia claimed that they possessed a Sultanic decree which entitled them as the sole possessor of the fishery and prohibited others to establish another fishery on the lake. They argued that from time immemorial they were regulating access to fish resources and were paying the tithe to the imperial treasury. The case is interesting because it reveals how an important source of subsistence could be contested and raised conflicts among villagers living adjacent to a freshwater source and would cause complex manifestations before the law. The case also reveals how everyday practices of the local people came into conflict with that of state laws, which were essentially used to manage fish resources and to organize taxation.