Egypt’s National Bar Association was established in 1912. Its original bylaws forbade its lawyer members from mixing with merchants, brokers or others who engaged in “exploitative” vocations. Years later, the Association’s first president, Ibrahim al-Hilbawi, wrote in his memoirs that in 1887 his work as a lawyer could have been detrimental to his marriage plans. The bride to be, who worked in the Khedival palace, did not understand what he did for a living. When she asked her officer about al-Hilbawi’s profession, he answered that a lawyer was “a forger and a swindler.” The purpose of this paper is to document and explain the changing views of the legal profession in Istanbul and Cairo from the mid-nineteenth century until the early decades of the twentieth century. The paper builds on studies of the creation of scholarly disciplines and professionalization in the modern Middle East. Histories of the legal profession in particular have focused on lawyers’ intellectual formation, career trajectories and political activism. By contrast, this paper will focus on how lawyers, a corps of professionals that was becoming increasingly visible from the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards, were understood by their contemporaries. It will draw on newspaper collections, state-enacted regulations of the profession and publications of lawyer associations. As such, this paper engages with a broad question within intellectual and social history, namely, the question of reception. Intellectual histories are frequently interested in exploring the lineage of certain ideas and why these ideas become manifest in certain contexts. They are usually less interested in how these ideas were understood within the larger social context. This paper attempts to overcome this difficulty through capturing the extent to which certain ideas about the legal profession became thinkable or widespread. It focuses on Cairo and Istanbul not only because they were the sites of momentous experiments of legal reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also because of the existence of a vigorous journalistic tradition in both cities, which would enable a study of popular ideas.

In January 1871, an unusual printing was completed from Cairo’s Kāstalīya Press. Mūsā Kāstalī (b. 1816), the Italian-born owner and founder of the press, almost certainly had a hand in this affair. For the document was an eighty-three page defense of Mūsā’s claims against the Azharite Shaykh Ḥasan al-ʻIdwī al-Ḥamzāwī (1806-1886), who, Mūsā argued, had initiated the dispute when he refused to pay for the books that he commissioned off of Mūsā’s press. The matter had twice been heard at the commercial courts and decided in Shaykh Ḥasan’s favor. With little chance for judicial recourse, Mūsā’s case was now presented to the court of public opinion through the vehicle of print. The treatise was a curious mix of the drama of a business transaction gone sour, the intricacies of Cairene private printing, and the nuances of Egyptian, Ottoman, and European law. Indeed, it called for the reform of Egypt’s legal system. This paper uses Mūsā’s printing as a starting point for examining the ways in which material culture constituted the law in late nineteenth century Egypt. Specifically, I focus on how printed texts, and ideas about print, mediated peoples' engagement with the law. Why did the Egyptian state begin printing its laws from the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and did its purpose change? For whom were these texts intended? And how did people like Mūsā use them, and contest them, within and beyond the court? Mūsā’s treatise invoked multiple realms of legality through overtures made to the Cairene police, the commercial courts, the Italian consular court, the imperial Porte, and even threats to have the khedive and the Italian government intervene. His printing not only connects these legal entities which are often approached separately in historiography, but it also speaks to a broader intersection between printing and the law as the increasing ubiquity of the former changed legal practice for religious scholars, lawyers, and citizens into the early twentieth century. I therefore conclude with an examination of the impulses behind the printing of legal compilations like Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-ʻAbbāsī's al-Fatāwā al-Mahdīya, Fīlīb Jallād's Qāmūs al-idāra wa-al-qaḍāʼ, and Aḥmad Fatḥī Zaghlūl's al-Muḥāmā, and of responsa like the fatwas mailed in to al-Manār. I argue that they betray Egyptians’ new ideas regarding governance and legality, and the power of print to preserve, stabilize, and amplify content.

Drawing from a wide range of archival materials from the late Ottoman Empire, including slave petitions, slaveholding elites’ correspondences, police interrogations and court records, this paper focuses on the complex intersection of three major developments in the late Ottoman Empire: 1) the Ottoman Reform Edict in 1856 and the subsequent legal reforms, 2) the trade ban in African slaves in 1857 and its transforming effects on the Islamic law, and 3) the Caucasian expulsion in early 1860s and the transplanted customary law in the Caucasian settlements across the Ottoman Empire. Firstly, it traces how legal practices were carried over with Caucasian refugees to the Ottoman domains and how different legal systems interplayed with and worked against each other in determining not only the limits of slavery, but also how such liberal “fictions” as freedom and the equality before the law were vernacularized by the local agents in the Ottoman Empire. It navigates within a set of legal records, specifically of those that were called “freedom suits” (hürriyet davaları), with the aim of exploring how slaves built their claims in relation to different legal terrains, problems and concepts. Secondly, it looks at how legal institutions transformed during this time. Beginning with the foundation with the Supreme Council for Judicial Ordinances and especially after its transformation into the Ministry of Justice, the divide between the Ministry and the Office of the Shaykh al-Islām (which oversaw the Sharia courts in the country) became steep. Instead of looking at them as two separate bodies however, one that was aggressively taking over the entire legal practice and the other increasingly more confined to the domestic sphere, this paper uses slavery to examine the ways in which they cut across each other. Lastly, it briefly canvasses how these processes also bent the categories of ethnicity, race and gender, and speculates on the ways in which they added to the “violent turn” of events in the subsequent decades.

In 1905, a Singaporean mufti issued a fatwa permitting the purchase of insurance (sikurtāh) for cargo transported by ship. This responsum was clearly a document of its time – an attempt to grapple with new financial instruments, themselves emerging as popular options as a result of new advances in technology, in particular the advent of steamships. It also reflected the immediate concerns of a shrinking world, increasingly linked together by the possibility of travel and communication. But the markers of this increasingly connected world could be found not only in the document itself, but indeed in its subsequent circulation and reception in the Middle East. It was quickly noticed by the famous reformist figure, Rashīd Riḍā, who published it in his journal al-Manār in order to make an argument of his own: that markedly liberal notions of consent and religion ought to govern the shariʿa’s approach to the economic realm. Not to be outdone, one of Riḍā’s strongest opponents in Egypt, Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī, issued his own fatwa in response, drawing the same substantive conclusion but on more identifiably traditional grounds. The resulting polemic between the two figures lays bare the manner in which the contested terrain of Egyptian intellectual life – over questions as central to the fiqh tradition as the nature of legal authority (the right to ijtiḥād) and the basic methodological parameters of interpretation -- was constituted by both the rapid technological and social changes of the period, and a universe of discourse that was keenly attuned to happenings in other parts of the Muslim world. The engagement of reformists like Riḍā with the wider Muslim world is relatively well-known. My paper instead shifts attention towards their opponents, arguing that in confronting the arguments of the reformists, “traditionalists” too participated in wider networks of discussion which both enabled and constrained their engagement with modernity in particular ways. Specifically, I argue that they found ways to reconfigure the intellectual and social infrastructure of the old institution of the madhhab. At a moment when the madhhab’s role as an interpretive institution was being weakened, old-world scholarly and social protocols continued to provide a continuity with the past that enabled engagements with the present. The remnants of the madhhab paradigm, then, facilitated a remapping of networks of influence and identity that allowed “traditionalists” to both mark themselves off from reformists, and confront new problems in what they took to be authentic ways.