Staring in the late sixteenth century, as the sea became increasingly dangerous for Ottoman merchants and travelers, and as the Ottoman navy’s mastery of it became an increasingly distant memory, the chief jurists of the Ottoman Empire, the ?eyhülislams, responded to the challenges of rising maritime violence with a novel body of legal opinions (fatwas) that developed progressively in complexity and specificity. Lacking any tradition of maritime law in the Hanafi jurisprudential canon, late sixteenth and seventeenth-century ?eyhülislams used fatwas, later compiled and disseminated through fatwa collections, to chart a new course through murky legal waters. United by a concern with the boundary between the Abode of Islam (darülislam) and the Abode of War (darülharb) and its crossing, these maritime fatwas helped to clarify what those terms meant for a sea without borders; they compartmentalized acts of raiding and seizure that led to ownership disputes over ships and slaves into those where a previous owner could reclaim his property and those where he could not, taking into account the particularities of early modern Mediterranean commercial practices; they reinforced the Ottoman Islamic understanding of Ottoman subjecthood as inherently voluntary and contingent on obedience, but unaffected by involuntary or authorized travel by sea or to the darülharb; and they drew the line between acceptable and unacceptable raiding practices, underlining the necessity of sultanic approval and the sultan’s role as the gatekeeper of holy war. In their original issue, the fatwas discussed in this paper were often intended to support a particular side in lawsuits or to bolster sultanic edicts. In their collected form, I argue, the maritime fatwas were meant to provide authoritative guidance and comprised a new body of Ottoman maritime law.

This paper addresses how the Ottoman state, at a critical moment, used fatwas to negotiate its way between the Islamic legal tradition, agreements with other powers, and the needs of a bureaucratized state apparatus. I do this by exploring the debates around the release of enslaved children after the Ottoman-Russian Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774), and the Ottoman-Austrian Treaty of Sistova (1791). Both agreements required that captives be returned, but converts to the captor state’s religion were exempted. This raised a vital question: at what age were children competent to convert? In the 1770s, the Ottomans defensively asserted a reified, arguably “self-Orientalized” view of the legal importance of childhood conversions in order to oppose Russian claims and save face politically. But faced with Russian threats, they eventually agreed that children above a certain age were to be allowed to convert, while those below that age were not. Crucially, this was a considerable simplification of Islamic legal traditions, which valued mental competence above abstract age-based tests—but it was well-adapted to bureaucratic implementation. Similar questions arose following the Treaty of Sistova, and in the main portion of the paper, I conduct a detailed analysis of three fatwas preserved in the Ottoman archives from this period. Requested by the Porte from the chief jurisconsult (?eyhülislam), these clarify the status of child converts under Islamic law, but in a curious way. I place the fatwas' legal reasoning in the context of Hanafi legal tradition, showing crucial discontinuities. These discontinuities reveal legal sleight-of-hand, as the state attempted to imply justification for a conversion test which was not really valid. Yet, I argue, the fatwas reveal neither a blind adherence to tradition nor an abject concession to outside pressure, but a good-faith effort to reconcile international treaty obligations with domestic legal commitments and the bureaucratic need for a simple, legible conversion test. This was hardly a uniquely Ottoman question. Eighteenth-century European theorists argued that treaty law could never trump “natural law,” just as the US Supreme Court, in the past decade, has taken up the question of whether, and when, treaties can outweigh American domestic law. Thus, I close by suggesting that the Ottoman experience of international law was not an exceptional one of encounter and submission, but had much in common with that of its contemporaries, and of other states which see themselves as legally exceptional—including as the world’s current leading power.

In the collection of Ottoman documents of the Visovac monastery (Croatia) 26 fatwas issued by a local mufti are preserved. Most of the fatwas date from the late seventeenth century and contain responses on the issue of the Monastery’s right of usufruct over several land plots in a nearby village. The dispute between the Monastery and several Christian and Muslim residents of the village over these rights arose following the end of the Candian war, when the region was restored to Ottomans. Franciscans, who spent more than a decade in the nearby city of Šibenik returned to the monastery in 1672 after the sultan Mehmet IV issued them a ferman that allowed them to return and granted them their pre-war properties and rights. In the meantime, several villagers assumed the rights over the lands previously held by the monastery. The collection of fatwas regarding the dispute represents the practice of Christians seeking fatwas, which is virtually unknown to the scholars of Islamic law. Furthermore, the textual context of these fatwas can also be reconstructed by examining the court documents (hüccets), and correspondence between the monastery and local and central Ottoman authorities, which are preserved in the archive of the Monastery as well. This paper is structured in two parts. In the first part, I will examine the relationship between legal and political authority, the law and law enforcement, and the function of fatwa within juridical, and practical legal Ottoman context. Through a case study of the texts (court-issued documents, petitions to the local and central authorities, decrees issued by the local and central documents, and fatwas) documenting a specific legal dispute I will reconstruct the distinctive features of political and legal authorities and the boundaries between them. In the second part, I will try to determine the position and function of fatwa with respect to both the specific Ottoman contexts, and the existing scholarship.

It is now common knowledge that many Ottoman fatwas found their way into local sharia courts, where they were brought by litigants who wished to bolster their claims and attain a favorable resolution to their legal problems. Evidence of such practices can be best gauged from various Ottoman court records, where these fatwas were partially copied and inscribed into the text of the case summaries themselves. In this paper, I make use of six such fatwas, originating from the archive of the sharia court of Ottoman Sarajevo (1802-1804), in order to demonstrate that the amalgamation of these two distinct legal texts (the case summary and the fatwa) into a single narrative lends itself to new interpretive possibilities of both the ‘world’ described in the court summaries, and the law behind the mufti’s expert-opinions. My interest in the analysis of these court case summaries-cum-fatwas is hence twofold: textual and contextual. On the one hand, I examine the ways in which these two otherwise different genres of legal text influence and transform each other. For example, I investigate how background information about the litigants, apparent in the case summaries, allows for a contextual reinterpretation of fatwas at hand. At the same time, I seek to explain the judge’s rulings in the light of the legal reasoning which is provided by the muftis who issued the fatwas. On the other hand, I investigate under what circumstances litigants came to the court equipped with fatwas in order to substantiate their claims over a disputed inheritance. This line of investigation provides a solid ground for an analysis of complicated webs of familial relationships, as well as of different types of property which prompted close relatives to take each other to the court.