Scholars of Ottoman court registers (sicils) have noticed the standardization of legal documents across the Empire, as well as a certain degree of uniformity in the manners in which judges dealt with legal cases. However, the regional diversity of the legal practices has also been observed, especially between those that existed in Istanbul and in the provinces, and between those in Anatolia and in the Arab regions. Thus, it may be asked whether the legal practices also differed among the towns in Anatolia, which were closely integrated into the Istanbul-centered system of judicial administration. This paper focuses on three Anatolian towns, namely Ankara, Tokat, and Aintab, during the late eighteenth century, and compares their respective solutions to the issue of missing husbands and deserted wives. Because a deserted wife virtually could not remarry according to the orthodox Hanafi interpretation of shari‘a, some legal devices were adopted to formulate a practical solution on site. By also referring to the opinions of the Ottoman Sheyhülislâms, the relationship between law-making in the imperial center and legal practices at the local level will be explored through this case study. An examination of the court records in three towns reveals that in all of the cases reviewed, the court validated the husband’s death by accepting witnesses or informants and consequently approved the wife’s remarriage, but the procedures for this validation varied. Noticeably, one judge who served in both Ankara and Tokat dealt with the matters differently in each location. The regional diversity is significant, given the fact that the mid-seventeenth-century Sheyhülislâm had already issued a fetva (fatwa) that sanctioned the acceptance of informants concerning the missing husband’s death, which was included in his widely-read fetva collection. I argue that the short tenure of judges—often less than a year during the eighteenth century—led to the increasing role of the court scribes of local origin in shaping and maintaining local legal practices.

In the standard historical narrative, modernizing reform in nineteenth-century Egypt included the drafting of “secular” laws governing most areas of life except family affairs. Muslim family law is often said to have been “untouched” by reform until after the First World War. Codification of family law began with Law No. 25 of 1920, which concerned marriage and divorce. This law and the subsequent Law No. 25 of 1929 concerning divorce are held up as examples of the modernist method of takhayyur, or the “selection” of legal norms from diverse schools of law so as to achieve a desired end, as opposed to rigid adherence to the established Hanafi school of law. These laws are also seen as advancing women’s rights by enabling them to collect arrears of maintenance from their husbands more easily and to annul their marriages for non-support, desertion, or the disappearance of their husbands. This paper argues that the laws of the 1920s were not the beginning of Muslim family law reform but a second stage in the process. The nineteenth century witnessed reforms in the organization and procedures of the Sharia courts. These procedural reforms abolished a centuries-old system of legal pluralism, in which the doctrines of the four Sunni schools of law were applied, by restricting the courts to applying the Hanafi doctrine. Until then Egyptians availed themselves of the school of law most favorable to the outcome they desired: a kind of forum shopping or venue shopping that allowed a degree of flexibility in the applied law that was lacking in the doctrines of the individual schools. As for married women, Hanafi law made it difficult for them to collect arrears of maintenance from their husbands, and it did not allow them to obtain a divorce even when their husbands failed to support them, deserted them, or disappeared. Contrary to the accepted narrative, the laws of the 1920s did not advance women’s rights beyond what was the historical practice. These laws restored some (and only some) of the legal options women had lost nearly a century earlier due to the procedural reforms. The modernist method of takhayyur was necessitated by the abolition of pluralism, and perhaps was inspired by the memory of the old system.

Despite a few attempts of the Ottoman sultans to re-establish the classical image of the ghazi-sultan, conquest played a minimal role in the legitimization of Ottoman dynasty in the seventeenth century. Emphasis on piety and religious orthodoxy were among the new tools of sultanic legitimization. The ensuing rise of the sharia was also parallel to the post-classical socioeconomic transformations. In this paper, I will analyze the impacts of the legal transformat?ons in the second half of the seventeenth century on the lives and statuses of the women of Istanbul. I argue that the decline of the Ottoman kanun and the rise of the sharia in the seventeenth century had complicated impacts on women from different socio-economic backgrounds. On the one hand, the rise of the sharia and the decline of the timar-system increased middle- and higher-class women’s opportunity to amass considerable amount of wealth primarily through inheritance and family waqfs. On the other hand, the decline of the Ottoman criminal law based on the kanun left questions of transgressions against women’s body and sexuality in the jurisdiction of the sharia, which had more ambiguous rulings on the issues. The latter development influenced mostly the women of lower classes, who had to appear in the public areas to earn their livelihood. I base my arguments on the analysis of the Istanbul court records, the fatwa compilations of the seventeenth-century Ottoman ?eyhülislams, the complaint registers, and the mühimme defters.

From the late fifteenth century onward, the diplomatic instruments that regulated peaceful relations between the Ottomans and the Venetians, the ahdnames, contained clauses prohibiting piracy and the enslavement of each other’s subjects. By the seventeenth century, however, the sultan’s nominal subjects in North Africa were not only regularly violating these provisions—with Tunisian and Algerian corsairs routinely attacking Venetian ships and raiding Venetian shores—they were also challenging the articles’ legitimacy. Indeed, the ahdnames, which were framed as unilateral sultanic decrees, had little grounding in Islamic law. A series of raids by Tunisian corsairs on Venetian targets in the 1620s brought the issue to a head, with Tunisian representatives in Istanbul arguing after the fact that the principles of retaliation, custom, and Islamic law gave them the right to stage attacks against Venice irrespective of whatever the ahdname promised. Following this, Ottoman officials turned to the ?eyhülislam Zekeriyyazade Yahya Efendi, the Empire’s chief jurisconsult, to address the matter of how and why the ahdname was binding upon the Tunisians according to Islamic law. Tracing the controversy across Ottoman and Venetian sources, this paper examines the ?eyhülislam’s response to the issue, laid out first in letters, then in a series of fatwas, exploring how he used the gravitas of his office to reinforce the religious legitimacy of the otherwise secular ahdnames. The end result was a stark reaffirmation of the sultan’s sole right to declare and direct holy war, making any unauthorized raid an act of criminal rebellion.

The Ottoman ?eyhülislam was the empire’s chief jurist, issuing Islamic legal opinions (fatwas) at the request of individual subjects and of the state. Given Wael Hallaq’s recent argument that there was a discernible “rule of law” in pre-modern Islamic states, and in light of current constitutional dilemmas in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey, the relationship between the Ottoman state and Islamic law remains vital to our understanding of Islamic legal history and of the political future of the Muslim world—but it is also surprisingly understudied. Richard Repp has suggested that the jurists were co-opted, and came simply to legitimate the sultans' orders. Colin Imber, for his part, showed the ?eyhülislams’ role in reconciling the Islamic holy law (sharia) with secular decrees (kanun). Baber Johansen, meanwhile, has argued for the role of muftis in other times and places as agents of legal change. I offer a different perspective, drawing on a diverse array of legal opinions from the central Ottoman archives. These fatwas dealt with the fraught questions surrounding captivity, as the Ottomans curbed the enslavement of enemy soldiers captured in wartime, and mandated the return of all enemy captives without ransom upon making peace. Whether it was enslaving rebels, releasing captured Russians, or adjudicating the legitimacy of foreign slaves' conversions, the Ottoman state turned to the ?eyhülislam for advice on many of the most contentious issues raised in this process. Using archival documents generated by both the Ottoman scribal service and the ?eyhülislam's office, I chart the interplay between the foreign and domestic political considerations which led the Porte to consult the ?eyhülislams, and the Islamic legal traditions upon which the ?eyhülislams drew. How faithful to the tradition were they, when apparent conflicts arose? The ?eyhülislam, I conclude, certainly could affect legal change, and he did offer powerful legitimation to political decisions—but the state also seems to have consulted the ?eyhülislam for genuine legal, ethical, and even pragmatic guidance. The ?eyhülislam, for his part, appears to have navigated between the legal tradition and the desire to afford his “client” (the sultan) maximum leeway within the law. In this, I suggest, the ?eyhülislam’s position resembled the contentious role of legal advisers in other governments—including the twenty-first century United States.