The Ottoman court registers have long been recognized for their immense historical value. The thousands of case summaries they contain, involving both litigated disputes and registered claims, offer evidence about various facets of Ottoman economy and society, and, more indirectly, daily life in many cities of the empire. Ironically, however, the registers have been thought to tell us very little about Ottoman law as such. Details about substantive and procedural rules are scant, and explicit judicial decisions and sentences are almost never to be found. And certain types of cases, especially criminal ones, are few. These silences have strengthened the view that the sacred law (sharia) was toothless and ineffective, forcing the Ottoman sultanate to incorporate the sacred courts into its expanding bureaucracy and to make up the shortfall of justice by promulgating and enforcing its own secular laws (kanun). By the 19th century, the secularizing reforms of the Tanzimat completed the eclipse of the sacred law. I challenge this common narrative of duality in Ottoman law by considering the case of Râziye, an ordinary resident of Üsküdar (one of Istanbul's Asian districts) who was executed, so far as we can tell, for participating in a rebellion after the 1585 monetary crisis. The records give few details about the rebellion or what exactly Râziye's offense was. Instead, it dwells on the disposition of her estate. The implication is that the Ottoman sharia courts, when it came to public crimes, were not effective enough in dealing with them and were thus stripped of the jurisdiction to do so. Using Râziye’s case to illustrate, I show that limitations on what the courts do are better explained not by judicial inefficacy but by juridical design. Classical treatises on political theory discuss in detail what the respective roles of judges and rulers ought to be—the one mediating claims and disputes, the other policing compliance with public norms—and it has been overlooked that Ottoman jurists continued and expanded this genre. In looking at this theory side by side with cases like Râziye’s, this paper argues that the line between “sacred” and “secular” law, as understood by Ottoman legal officials, did not exist in the way legal historians have commonly supposed. Problematizing these categories will serve us greatly in understanding how the Ottoman legal system, as well as other premodern Islamic legal systems, worked as an integrated whole of norms and institutions.

This paper examines the place of Sufism (tasawwuf) and the supernatural (khawariq al-‘ada) in the thought of Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917-1996)—a classically trained Egyptian Muslim scholar and one-time leading intellectual of the Muslim Brotherhood. It charts the evolution and aftermath of his 1967 call for the revival of Sufism, and reveals how this call was intertwined with the mid-twentieth century translation into Arabic of texts written by American metaphysicians and spiritualists. Together with these American thinkers, Ghazali believed that the study of the human spirit could undercut the pervasive scientific materialism of the era. Although Sufism and the supernatural are often depicted within the secondary literature as disparaged by Muslim reformers, during the 1950s and 1960s the mystical and the miraculous were championed by many reformers as discursive arenas in which they could make claims about the ability of the human and the divine to transcend science’s natural laws. This paper contextualizes Ghazali’s interest in Sufism and the supernatural by showing how it was related to the process by which Muslim thinkers came to see tasawwuf (Sufism) as “Islamic mysticism,” or the Islamic expression of a universal religious phenomenon; and renewed discussions about the nature and potentials of “the human,” which were galvanized by the installation of global human rights regimes during the mid-twentieth century. This paper hones in on three texts Ghazali published at the height of his intellectual career. In the first from 1961, Ghazali positions himself as a defender of Sufism, arguing that is the most important, yet most neglected of the classical Islamic sciences and attempts to resuscitate a central Sufi text—Ibn ‘Ata’ Allah al-Iskandari’s (d. 1309) book of aphorisms—by offering new interpretations for the words of this Sufi master. In the second from 1967, Ghazali details his extensive reading of the works of American metaphysicians and goes on to call for the revival of Sufism. The third from 1980 is a manual for the supplication (du‘a’) and invocation (dhikr) of God in which Ghazali discusses the inability of science to explain the miraculous effects of prayer. Ultimately, by demonstrating how the views of one of the twentieth century’s most prominent Sunni Muslim reformers transcended modernist epistemologies and ontologies, this paper aims to challenge one of the predominate narratives on modern Islamic Reform, which holds that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Muslim intellectuals “functionalized,” “objectified,” and “rationalized” Islam.

This paper examines the dynamics between the magzoub and the homeless individual in contemporary Egypt. The magzoub, literally derived from “he who is attracted to God” is a saint-like holy fool rooted in the Islamic tradition, traditionally understood to be imbibed with baraka, or blessing, and was often revered and sought out by common people for the magzoub’s purported otherworldly connection to God. Noted for their eccentric and often colorful speech, appearance, and manner, the magazib were sanctioned by a cultural tradition that accommodated them and their ways which shunned the traditional pillars of family and home, similar to the holy fools of medieval Europe or Hindu Sadhus of South Asia. Based on research drawn from various literary sources, these wandering ascetics seemed to be a salient feature of everyday life from the medieval to the modern period in Egypt. Today, they are mainly found at moulids, large festive religious gatherings associated with Muslim saints but historically were more ubiquitous. In recent decades, popular belief in the magzoub has fallen by the wayside, coinciding with the emergence of the street-dwelling musharrad homeless individual as a separate social category, associated with mental illness, social delinquency, and criminality, consigned to social exile. Street-dwellers in Egypt constitute an ‘invisible’ and marginal social category, existing outside of normative householder society in an unmarked and unbounded social space that functions as a “state of exception” where various rights and civil liberties normally conferred upon domiciled Egyptian citizens are suspended, in stark contrast to the treatment previously afforded the magzoub. This research does not just attempt to collapse the distinctions between magzoub and musharrad, but rather to suggest that a paradigm shift that has taken place, transforming certain members of the itinerant poor associated with the divine into the vagrant homeless associated with profane street life. This paper argues that the magzoub is the precursor to the contemporary homeless individual and that this phenomenon far from being specific to Egypt has parallels in other historical examples around the world. Based on fieldwork conducted for a research project on homelessness in Egypt, this paper engages with the anthropology of religion in Egypt as well as the anthropology of marginal social groups by examining a certain liminal social group that straddles two domains.