The Ottoman Mahalle in Court Records, 17-19th Centuries, Part II
Panel 064, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
This panel aims to explore the dynamics and workings (as opposed to normative existence) of Ottoman neighborhoods (mahalles) in the early modern period, focusing mainly on the records of the Shari‘a courts. There is recently a growing body of literature that challenges the ideal representations of neighborhoods as rather homogeneous units of administration regulated by the government (top-down). Our panel includes papers that question this paradigm in a number of ways and underline the importance of various associations that were the result of initiatives from below. Thus we aim to start a conversation among scholars who work on different aspects of daily life in neighborhoods and to try to establish certain trends, be they parallel or contradictory in different neighborhoods with different composition and specificities. We believe our panel can serve as a starting point for this purpose, since the sheer volume of the court records make it mandatory for researchers to share their findings with each other and the scholarly community at large in order to draw reliable conclusions.
To allow better comparison, and to draw from a larger pool of data we propose a triple panel. The first two will include papers focusing on the neighborhoods of the greater Istanbul area (including Eyup, Galata, and Uskudar) between seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the third one on areas outside of the capital – Cairo, Salonica, Jerusalem, Diyarbakir, and Trabzon.
Part I: Istanbul neighborhoods in the 17th century
Part II: Istanbul neighborhoods during the 18th and 19th centuries
Part III: Ottoman neighborhoods in the provinces, 17th and 18th centuries
The papers will focus on the interactions of dynamic communities including Muslims and non-Muslims, religious dignitaries, women, merchants, immigrants, and Janissaries to name a few. Topics to be explored include maintenance of public order and security; expulsions and procedures used in different neighborhoods including different kinds of kefalet (surety) and ways of rehabilitating the “undesirable” or “immoral” residents; the role/purpose of the courts in the resolution of such cases; the integration of female palace slaves into residential neighborhoods upon manumission and their role as transmitters of palace culture; and local places of worship and their role in the administration of justice.
The wide geographical range will allow us to better understand what kinds of procedures and associations we can observe in these various neighborhoods, in addition to the unique dynamics of each location and time period.
The Ottoman neighborhood members acting as Witnesses or Informants
in front of the qadi courts (18th century Üsküdar)
The Ottoman urban neighborhood (mahalle) corresponded to a multiplicity of functions, senses and practices. The term mahalle designated an administrative and fiscal part of the towns as well as a particular social bond, linking city dwellers the ones to the others in a specific way, implicating often collective responsibility between them. The members of a neighborhood shared juridical collective responsibility and acted as a legal entity in ottoman courts.
In this paper we will focus on the inhabitants of Ottoman neighborhoods when appearing on Ottoman courts as witnesses. There were several procedures for which the neighbors were called to the qadi courts as witnesses or informants. The procedure of identification of the individuals appearing in the qadi court (ta’rif) was one of them. In the early modern period, where identification papers were not available, their function was crucial. On the other side, when an individual was accused of misconduct, the ottoman courts addressed to his neighbors in order to be informed on his conduct (su-i hal). In both of these procedures, one can observe how the neighborhood could function as an informative network.
We aim to explore the proceeding of both of those procedures in order to get a better understanding of the juridical status and function that the neighborhood could gain in front of the qadi courts as an informative network. For this inquiry we will focus on the court procedures of the 18th century qadi court of Üsküdar.
This paper will examine the role played by public knowledge in the shari‘a courts of Cairo in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What I call public knowledge differed from the knowledge of a specific event by an individual person, which often appears in the court records as testimony. Public knowledge was information known by all the people of a neighbourhood – the ahl al-mahalla or sometimes simply the muslimin – or at least a group of the more prominent among them. Public knowledge might relate to an individual person, but it did not usually refer to a specific event. Rather, public knowledge consisted of general information about someone’s character, reputation or status, or about a community’s customs and standards. I use the phrase “public knowledge” in order to capture the ambiguity between verifiable information and widely-held opinion. A statement of this kind of knowledge did not meet the requirements of the shari‘a for testimony, and when it appears in the court records it is usually designated not as testimony (shahada) but simply as a report (khabar).
Although it did not strictly speaking constitute “proof,” as it did not conform to the legal concept of testimony, public knowledge could have an impact in a court case in Ottoman Cairo. It could be a used as a weapon by the ahl al-mahalla, in order to enact sanctions against a neighbour who violated their standards of behaviour or morality. It was also used as a resource by judges who needed to confirm identity, the nature of a relationship, or the reputation of litigant. Lastly, it could be drawn on by a litigant to add credibility to his or her claim. In this paper I will explore what kinds of information were presented as public knowledge and what kinds of people presented and used it. I will argue that neighbourhood residents, or perhaps their prominent representatives, sought to use the shari‘a courts to impose and enforce standards of behaviour distinct from, though informed by, the shari‘a. The cases I will discuss suggest that the admissibility of public knowledge in the courts allowed the neighbourhood community to become an important, if unofficial, legal person.
Ottoman society had long been depicted as a society regulated from above through the mediation of autonomous organizations. Guilds, religious bodies, villages and tribes were all responsible for their followers' behavior and for the fulfillment of various duties enforced upon the reaya. Yet, the Ottoman city also encompassed communal associations that were the result of initiative from below. The neighborhood (mahalle) can be regarded as one such grouping: it did not receive formal recognition (with exception of blood payments) or assignments, but its members used it as a means to enforce security and maintain local and communal infrastructure. Cohesion among its members was shaped and maintained by the symbolic position of the neighborhood place of worship (mosque, church or synagogue). These religious establishments were the base of molding the inhabitants' distinct identity and affiliation. In addition, these sacred sites were the places where most of community's life was conducted. While mixed neighborhoods existed in Ottoman cities, the significance of the local religious institutions perpetuated the religious division into distinguished communities. In this paper I am using the records (sicil) of the kadi's court to present and to analyze the prevailing position of the neighborhood places of worship as the center of communal activity, as well as the symbol of collective identity, in the Ottoman city. My main case study is eighteenth-century Ottoman Salonica.
