This paper focuses on the early 19th century Ottoman codes on functioning of markets, determination of prices and corruption crimes in such functions. I argue that regulation of market related activity and associated crimes in the 19th century Ottoman Empire are based on a notion of justice that became increasingly related to perception of markets as naturally-functioning, spontaneous mechanisms that help assess the scope and efficacy of government action. Conceptualization of markets as following a natural order is at the heart of Quesnay’s Tableau Économique, which was published in 1758—in the midst of debates about the reach of police des grains encapsulating the relationship between the “belief in market orderliness” and the “expansion of the penal sphere.” Conviction in markets’ natural order necessitates a reconceptualization of government’s role as the “spontaneity” of the market makes interference unnecessary (at the theoretical level). There are two implications for this. First, as Alan Supiot observed, the nature of governing changes. The logic of governing is not left in the hands of a cameralist state. Rather, we see a shift from government to governance through relinquishing a big part of our life and freedoms to the law and the state. The second implication is that the market becomes a site of veridiction (in Foucoultian terms) as it becomes an experiment site where one can pinpoint excessive governance. The market becomes the ruler to measure how much one should govern. A similar transformation happened in the Ottoman Empire. Consider the institutional transformation of the provisioning mechanism: The validity of Ottoman provisioning institutions (such as price control, monitored guild structures, controlled monopsonistic purchases through a requisition system etc.) came under increased scrutiny by the end of the 18th century as consultative bodies explored options to eliminate the inefficiencies in the provisioning system. The requisitioning agents’ abuse of power and smuggling were identified as systemic problems, the official price policy was abolished and a Central Grain Administration was founded to prevent irregularities in supply of grain to Istanbul (a similar trend was observed in the provisioning of meat). By the end of the eighteenth century Istanbul was negotiating the price with the representatives of the providers in a competitive manner and by mid-nineteenth century due to the requisitioning agents’ “corruption” the system was abolished all together. This paper will focus on the relationship between the “market order” and the penal sphere in the Ottoman Empire.

In contrast to the late nineteenth century, the crucial years of Mehmed Ali Pasha’s government in Egypt (1805-1848) often appear as a veritable dark age for al-Azhar in the scholarly literature, in the sense of sparse sources and of “hard times” for the mosque-madrasa. Moreover, the virtual absence of al-Azhar and religion generally from our understanding of Mehmed Ali’s regime contributes to the untenable perception of the early nineteenth century as a time of profound cultural westernization. In fact, certain now-obscure Azharī scholars actually played a major role in providing ideological justification for the reforms of Mehmed Ali, especially the preacher of al-Azhar Ibrāhīm al-Saqqā (d. 1873) and the judge of Alexandria Ibn al-ʿAnābī (d. 1851). Far-reaching changes in the endowment (waqf) system, previously been the basis of so much scholarly wealth, did earn Mehmed Ali the emnity of many Azharīs, but archival evidence does not support the idea, advanced by writers like al-Jabartī (d. 1825), that Mehmed Ali failed to support religious institutions like al-Azhar. Contrary to the claims of his supporters, however, he did not allow full autonomy to al-Azhar either. What the surviving budgets and Ottoman-language state registers show is that Mehmed Ali was slow to intervene in Azharī affairs, but he was able to do so by the 1830’s, partly through repression. The blind shaykh al-Quwaysnī (d. 1838), intendant of the Badawī (Sufi) shrine in Tanta and eventually rector of al-Azhar, led symbolic resistance to some of Mehmed Ali’s policies, as demonstrated by numerous petitions. In 1830, many of his supporters were arrested as a result of their protests against the appointment of Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 1835), a reformer and close ally of the pasha, as rector of al-Azhar. Significantly, the period cannot be understood without reference to the Ottoman context, not only because Mehmed Ali’s centralization efforts and justifications thereof mirrored those of Istanbul, but also because Turcophones were increasingly favored within al-Azhar itself. Building on previous work concerning Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār and studies of early nineteenth-century Ottoman Sufi orders outside of Egypt, this paper will argue that the ideological conflicts of the era were reflected among Islamic scholars, not polarized between a “westernizing” state and its “reactionary” Islamic opponents.

What explains the variation in the legal systems of Middle Eastern states? This paper addresses the building of colonial institutions in the Middle East and their subsequent evolution with a focus on the legal system. Colonial institutions have been linked to a wide variety of political outcomes, from democracy and economic development to domestic order and international security. However, our understanding of the emergence and persistence of colonial institutions remains limited. Why were imperial powers able to transplant their preferred institutions into some of their colonies, and not others? What accounts for the historical evolution of these legal systems? A rapidly growing “legal origins” literature has shown that legal institutions influence financial development, government ownership of banks, and the regulation of labor markets. At the same time, there is a widely shared assumption across the new institutional economics scholarship that post-colonial institutions reflect the choices of the colonizer, whether it is the extraction of resources or the building of representative institutions. This is a highly problematic assumption that discounts the colonized populations’ agency. Accounts of colonial history provide numerous examples where subject populations and local elites resisted imperial designs, appropriated colonial institutions for their own purposes, and occasionally collaborated with the imperial powers to reach separate ends. This paper shows that legal institutions in the Middle East were shaped by the engagement between the European powers, pre-existing institutional frameworks, and domestic urban classes. More specifically, it argues that the level of implementation of pre-colonial legal and administrative reforms affected the relationship between the colonial administrations and the local elites. Regions with extensive pre-colonial institution-building, such as Egypt, were able to resist direct transplantation of the institutions of the colonizer. Areas where the pre-colonial institution-building and reform efforts were less intensive, such as Palestine, Jordan, and Cyprus, were more thoroughly penetrated by colonial institutions. This paper provides a comparative analysis of legal institution-building in the late Ottoman period in the Middle East, and examines the impact of these efforts on the subsequent transformations of legal institutions under British rule and the nation states.

A woman sued a man alleging that the latter owed a debt to her deceased husband. While testifying, she listed the heirs of the deceased, including herself, and their relationship to him. When questioned, the defendant acknowledged the debt but denied everything else. Then the plaintiff produced witnesses who corroborated her account of her late husband’s heirs, thereby establishing their standing in the legal record. Cases of this sort appear frequently in the inheritance registers of the Sharia Courts of al-Mansura and al-Daqahliyya province in Egypt from the 1860s through the 1890s. Often the debt involved was trivial. Why sue, as one widow did, for a one-eighth share of ten piasters (1 ¼ piasters), when her court costs exceeded two piasters? The answer is that suits such as these were a strategy to establish the identity of heirs omitted from the legal record: the woman’s share of her late husband’s estate came to 892 piasters. Later ethnographic studies suggest that conflicts between multiple wives and the children of different mothers often resulted in the collusion of some heirs to exclude others. In Hanafi jurisprudence, which was applied in the Egyptian Sharia Courts at the time, the rules governing conflicting testimony (ta‘arud al-bayyinat, ikhtilaf al-shihadat) are quite complicated. Comparatively speaking, a suit to collect a debt was a simpler way to correct the record than attempting to prove the fraudulent exclusion of one or more heirs. This paper draws on court records and fatwas from late nineteenth-century Egypt, juridical texts, and recent legal and social studies. It shows that Sharia Court entries, including probate inventories, are not necessarily a transparent record of social life – one has to ask what is not mentioned. It also demonstrates that while legal theory can be understood through the study of juridical compendia, explications, and commentaries, one must also study fatwa collections and court records to apprehend how the law was applied in everyday life. Last, it highlights the agency of disadvantaged individuals (often women and children) in asserting their rights within the legal system.