Müftîzâde Ahmed (Müftīzāde Aḥmed) was a bright and highly regarded member of the Ottoman judicial bureaucracy. He participated in the military campaign against Russia in 1772 as judge-advocate of the field army (ordu qāḍīsī) and continued to rise in the judicial hierarchy. He was appointed to the prestigious post of qadi of Istanbul in October 1782. This was a period of turmoil in foreign policy as the Ottoman Empire came to the brink of war with Russia and Austria over various issues. The chief of scribes, Mehmed Hayrî, who was responsible for conducting these negotiations, saw the gravity of the issues at stake and feared making any mistakes, and as a result, wanted other members of the bureaucracy to be present. Despite the enormous judicial and municipal responsibilities of his position, due to his vast knowledge and experience, he was instructed to join the Ottoman delegation conducting these negotiations with the Russian ambassador. After completing his one-year tenure in that post in October 1783, he was not given any office, but he received a promotion and continued to represent the empire in the negotiations. In all treaties and protocols of the period, he had his signature as a member of the delegation consisting of three government officials. After serving first as chief judge (qāḍī-ʿasker) of Anatolia, in February 1786, he reached the highest rank of grand mufti (shaykh al-Islām). He supported a war against Russia and issued his legal opinion (fatwā) to that end in the summer of 1787. However, shouldering that great responsibility, he later regretted his decision and went into a nervous breakdown after Austria joined the war in alliance with Russia, and unable to fulfill his duties, he was removed from his post. He never had any office afterward, but he was forced to reside outside the imperial capital like other former grand muftis due to the government’s fear of criticism about the conduct of the war, which shows that former grand muftis’ opinion carried weight in the bureaucratic circles. This paper will use primary sources from the State Archives of Turkey and contemporary and near-contemporary sources of the era to construct his career and highlight the jurists' role in formulating and legalizing foreign policy decisions apart from their more traditional roles.

Scholarly study of the Ottoman grandee household has tended to concentrate on the political functions of this organization, especially as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In that period grandee households provided the necessary administrative agency for perpetuating dynastic state authority just when the political institutions of the “classical” sixteenth-century imperial state were faced with serious challenges. An understudied question is to what extent grandee households correspondingly expanded their judicial functions as well. This paper addresses the question with a comparison of two grandee households, that of Murtaza Pasha, governor of Aleppo province in the years 1658-60, and of Ökuz Ömer Pasha, governor of Diyarbakir in 1670-71. Making use of income registers (sing. irad defteri), which provide a wealth of detail on household operations, the paper surveys the range of crimes investigated by members of the governors’ households – from homicide and personal injury to property damage -- and the fines that they assessed and collected as punishment. The distribution of these duties among household members and client agents will be examined in depth. Because the chief judges of provincial capitals were responsible for checking the powers of the governor, this paper will also make use of local law court records (sijillat) with the aim of identifying general patterns in the coordination or contestation between the governor’s council (divan) and the law court. Local biographical dictionaries where available will also provide significant information on the social context of the judicial process and the political history of the cities. In sum, this study will contribute not only to the history of grandee households but also to the study of law, both Shari’a and Kanun, as they were applied in Ottoman society in a period of political transition.

In 1489, the Ottoman Prince Cem became a papal captive in Rome after years of ignominious peregrinations around the strongholds of France. As a rival claimant to his brother Bayezid II’s throne, Cem was a valuable hostage offering his captors “a compelling means to constrain the unbridled ferocity of the Turks against the Christians.”[i] Accordingly, his fate dominated the agendas of popes and kings until his death in 1495 and prompted a period of intense Ottoman diplomacy with Italian courts. Among Bayezid II's new friends was Marquis Francesco II Gonzaga of Mantua (r. 1484-1519), a mercenary captain and avid horse-breeder. During repeated diplomatic embassies to Istanbul, Gonzaga offered luxury textiles, animals, and Italian-made armor in exchange for Ottoman horses in large numbers. Accordingly, in this paper, I adopt the Mantuan-Ottoman relationship as a point of entry into a re-assessment of this consequential period. Undertaking the first comprehensive study of Francesco II’s Ottoman diplomacy since 1965, I draw upon a substantial corpus of under-utilized and unpublished correspondence in Italian and Turkish from the Ottoman Archives and the Archivio Gonzaga in Mantua. I trace how Mantuan agents gained knowledge of the Ottoman court, built relationships with provincial and central office-holders, and shared information with a wide mercantile network around the Adriatic under Venetian tutelage. Then, I offer a re-assessment of the papacy's role in these relationships. Despite longstanding papal embargos on the provision of strategic goods to Muslim rulers, I argue that Pope Innocent VIII and Alexander VI did not forbid Francesco II's activities outright. Instead, they played an essential and changeable role in mediating Mantuan-Ottoman contact to benefit their own negotiations over Cem's captivity. Synchronic and fine-grained, the view of Ottoman-Italian diplomacy visible from Mantua enriches not only our understanding of the 'Cem crisis' but also aids the ongoing revisionist interpretation of Sultan Bayezid II's reign. While the sultan negotiated at a disadvantage during Cem's captivity, his rule overall constituted not a 'weak link' but rather a period of administrative and cultural consolidation that continued the intense material exchanges with Italy begun during the reign of the more cosmopolitan Mehmed II. From Mantua to the Mamluk Sultanate, then, diplomacy helps situate Bayezid II more fully in an entangled history of the early modern Eastern Mediterranean. [i] Brief of Alexander VI to King Charles VIII of France, August 5, 1495 quoted by Sigismondo dei Conti da Foligno (my translation).

Joseph Schacht argued that the elaboration of precise rules in the sharīʿa (the furūʿ al-fiqh) was an intellectual exercise divorced from social reality, and thus irrelevant for society. Generations of scholars (including Wael Hallaq, among many others) have now rightly refuted Schacht’s argumentation by demonstrating that the furūʿ al-fiqh continued to be elaborated in dialogue with social realities, and therefore, they concluded, the sharīʿa is relevant to society. Shifting the question from relevance to function has potential to clarify legal dynamics in medieval society. But the normative writings of the fuqahāʾ, used by Hallaq and others as primary sources, are perhaps not the most reliable evidence to their own social relevance and role. Kristen Stilt’s framework of “Islamic law in action,” for her study of the muḥtasib in Mamluk Egypt, advances Islamic socio-legal history by using descriptive rather than prescriptive sources to determine the relevance of Islamic law “on the ground.” But she still presumes the accuracy of a normative framework in which the rulers’ decisions (siyāsa) were constrained and circumscribed by the sharīʿa as articulated by the scholars. At the same time, scholars such as Lev Weitz are beginning to investigate the role of the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt in the articulation of Islamic law. This paper will extend Stilt’s approach (in dialogue with socio-legal theory more broadly, such as the work of Sally Falk Moore) and Weitz’s insights to draw new conclusions based on both Muslim and Christian Arabic sources from late medieval Egypt (e.g. Ibn Taghribirdi, the History of the Patriarchs). In particular, the various iterations and alterations of discriminatory regulations on non-Muslims indicate that sultans only occasionally felt constrained by the dictates of the fuqahāʾ. Historical anecdotes about the successes and failures of qāḍīs in enforcing their views of the sharīʿa show that siyāsa constrained the practical implementation of fiqh more than vice versa. Indeed, to use Sally Falk Moore’s definition of legal pluralism, it seems that the fuqahāʾ did not constitute a “semi-autonomous social field” necessary for jurisprudential independence. Thus, we might more accurately understand the social role of Islamic legal scholars if we picture them as lobbyists seeking to influence the ruling class, rather than as legislators whose decisions constituted “Islamic law,” or even as jurisprudents elucidating a law independent of the sultans’ own decisions.

Over the past fifteen years, Palestinian-Syrian thinker Fayez A. Sayegh (1922-1980) has received increasing scholarly attention by intellectual historians who recognize how his short monograph “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine” (PLO Research Center, 1965) paved the way for the later use of settler colonialism as a framework for understanding Zionism. This budding interest in Sayegh’s writings, however, has only rarely accompanied deeper study into his life and other work, with the important exception of one biography focused exclusively on his life before 1948. Much of Sayegh’s highly consequential later career – ranging from his years as the leading Arab League spokesmen in the United States in the 1950s, during which time he was the most vocal Palestinian in the country, to his central role in crafting and advocating for 1975 United Nations General Assembly resolution that characterized Zionism as a form of racism while working for Kuwait’s UN delegation – remains unknown to scholars in related fields. This paper will offer a fuller account of Sayegh’s life and activities, which a special emphasis on the forgotten years of his first stint in the United States from the late 1940s to early 1960s, through his work with the PLO in the 1960 and his career in the 1970s as an effectively ‘stateless diplomat’ working for Arab UN delegations in New York. The paper will further try to address why this industrious Palestinian thinker, considered by some to be the most prominent Palestinian voice in the United States prior to Edward Said’s emergence as a public intellectual, remained overlooked for so many years after his untimely passing in 1980. Part of this explanation will include a discussion of the vast, 400-box archive of his papers surprisingly located in Salt Lake City. Other reason may relate to Sayegh’s “falling through the cracks” of subfields given his longtime residence in the United States without being an Arab American or clearly defined as a Palestinian during certain years. In sum, the paper aims to make more scholars aware of Sayegh’s work and his archives while also offering more clarity on basic details of his career.