This paper explores the Ottoman state’s efforts to regulate the Islamic family laws in the early twentieth century. Rather than seeing the late Ottoman legal reform as a well-thought-out and organized state project, I focus on the pragmatic and ephemeral strategies the Ottoman state employed in reforming Sharia as part of its growing bureaucratic anxieties about the supervision of marriages and religious laws throughout the empire. After the codification of civil laws in 1870s, Shari’a was practically confined to the legal domain of family affairs in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman bureaucracy had been troubled by an outbreak of socio-legal problems caused by the religiously approved but officially unregistered marriages, such as the marriages of the soldiers’ wives during the WWI. Therefore state’s lack of legal control over religious marriages due to Sharia’s relative autonomy became a crucial concern for the Young Turk regime after 1913. Having serious misgivings about the compatibility of Shari’a and the modern state, the Young Turk elite got caught in the middle of a conflict over the reform of matrimonial laws. How would the Ottoman state fulfill legal reform in the domain of family, which, for the Ottoman ulema and the reformers alike, had constituted the core of Sharia and undergirded the national moral values? Proposed as a viable solution for the effective supervision of marriages, the Young Turk regime codified the religious family laws in 1917, and put criminal codes into use to impose marriage registration and prenuptial licenses. Based on archival research of the reform of matrimonial laws and their unintended consequences in everyday life, this paper examines how the Ottoman state encompassed marriage with a new evidential regime to monitor and regulate the private lives of its citizens. By doing so, the Ottoman state undertook an ambivalent role in undercutting Sharia’s jurisdiction through a series of legislation while simultaneously maintaining it to uphold new national ideals of family. This paper takes such ambivalences of reform as a crucial historical moment to scrutinize the problem of commensurability between Sharia and the modern state. It also aims to acknowledge the historical contingencies behind the Ottoman state’s increasing involvement in the governance of the religious laws and the family.

This paper analyzes the family (ahli) waqf as a contested site of sovereignty between the Ottoman and Egyptian governments during the period of indirect British colonial rule in Egypt. I compare different approaches of the Egyptian General Administration of Waqf and the Office of the Seyhülislam in Istanbul to the family as a site of capital accumulation. In the face of colonial encroachments on systems of land tenure and cash crop production, legal and economic experts in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire argued with each other in court over the extent of patriarchal authority enjoyed by the overseer (nazir) of the endowment. Looking at several court cases involving ahli waqfs belonging to members of the Khedival family, I underline how this debate was gendered. The concentration of waqf capital in the hands of male members of the family was accompanied by the dispossession of female members through the Custodial Court (Majlis al-Hasbi). I present different visions that were endorsed by Egyptian and Ottoman commentators of the waqf as an economic unit that was shielded from colonial encroachments, while at the same time underlining how the latter produced unanticipated outcomes in the shape of waqf.

The early Young Turk Period in late Ottoman Empire witnessed that many individuals from different provinces and ethnic-religious and social-economic backgrounds petition the higher state bodies, particularly the Sublime Porte, against the practice of torture. Through the prism of these petitions which are housed in the Prime Ministry Archives, Istanbul, and primarily by relying on the common and consistent language they employed, I suggest that the legal ban on torture was then a significant domain through which people commonly pursued the negotiation of political power. At the same time, this group of petitions suggests the existence of a widespread political consciousness across the society with regard to certain principles which the petitioners associated with the legal ban on torture, namely, the rule of law, individual rights and equality. More significantly, and through a closer reading of the petitions’ common language, I argue that for ordinary people from all around the empire the legal ban on torture embodied all the promises of the new regime based on which the Young Turks called themselves revolutionary. In other words, ordinary people commonly perceived the practice of torture as the yardstick for whether or not the “revolution” actually took steps towards creating a new beginning. Indeed, in this respect they attached a symbolic meaning to the practice of torture. Particularly because they were written at a time when the new regime was anxious to consolidate political authority and intensely concerned for legitimacy, these petitions used a highly political language and carefully employed the revolutionary discourse of the Young Turks to call on the ruling authorities. Most significantly, they often counterposed the notions of law, justice and rights to despotism, in a manner that goes much beyond rhetoric. As one can see by looking closely at how they commonly associated torture with despotism, it was significantly through the question of torture that ordinary people made sense of such abstract principles as the rule of law and equality. Indeed, reading between the lines of these petitions, one can further see why the practice of torture characterizes a despotic regime and is essentially contradictory to the rule of law and individual rights. Finally, I suggest that torture had such a meaningful significance for ordinary people because it was the one practice whereby people perhaps most obviously encountered the arbitrary exercise of state authority. It thus offers unique pathways to more comprehensively understand the late Ottoman reform.

During my research in the Ottoman registers at he shari’a court in Beirut, I came across an unusual register titled ‘wuqu’at kharijiya 4: 1322-1325’, which would translate roughly as ‘external occurrences or data 4: 1904-1908’. Number 4 probably means volume 4. Based on a preliminary reading of the contents of the register, it is evident that court representatives and at times judges attended to people’s legal affairs in homes, hotels, and hospitals. A significant number of cases involve high profile Beiruti families, both Christian and Muslim. The entries in the register include: power of attorney drawn in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, high profile inheritance cases, charitable endowments, and the appointment of guardians. The purpose of my paper is to shed light on this important legal practice during the late Ottoman period. The importance of the register lies in the questions that it raises. My paper hence seeks to answer the following questions: 1- How does the practice of ‘mobile’ justice fit within the context of Ottoman legal reforms? 2- What can we learn about the local practice of justice in late Ottoman Beirut? 3- What was the gender, socioeconomic, and religious background of people who requested such services? 4- What trends, if any, emerge from studying the entries in the register? 5- What new understandings of the role, function, and activities of the shari’a court can we gain by examining the practice of administering justice outside the confines of the courtroom? Despite the centrality of sectarian personal status laws to the sectarian system in modern-day Lebanon, studies that have attempted to examine the functioning of the legal system during the late Ottoman period remain very rare. By examining the contents of the register mentioned above, I hope to make a humble contribution toward a better historical understanding of the legal system during the late Ottoman period.

The French Revolution caught the Ottoman Empire entangled in a war against the Russian-Habsburg alliance. The developments in revolutionary France allowed the Empire an “honorable” exit from the war. Taking advantage of this, the Empire stayed neutral in the War of the First Coalition. Pascal Firges recently demonstrated in his book that even in their neutrality the Ottomans were willing to listen to the revolutionaries and entertained an alliance. The concept of liberté (translated as serbestiyet) found its way into Ottoman documents within this framework. The concept came to be perceived as dangerous when Napoleon embarked on his Italian adventure. While in Italy, Napoleon sent two agents to Mani in Morea, the Ottomans intercepted them and together with the Maniotes drew up a response to the General. In the same year, the Patriarch of Jerusalem who was in Istanbul published a pamphlet against the idea of liberté/eleftheria which was disseminated by the Ottomans. By 1797, the concept of liberté/serbestiyet became equated with sedition among the Orthodox populations of the Empire. This paper will focus on the concept of liberté using Ottoman and Greek documents mostly from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. I will explore the Ottoman perception of sedition and the alliance this perception of threat created between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Ottoman government. I will first discuss the parallel histories of liberté and serbestiyet before the Revolution. Then I will give examples of the uses of the concept in two languages focusing on Ottoman measures to counter French propaganda and agents in the Morea.