A dispute between villagers and nomads, and the role of Ottoman kadis in (hopefully) solving it Ottoman kadis also acted as notaries: and here we will deal with rather a special instance of their duties as public recorders and probable mediators. Beginning in the late 17th century and well into the mid-19th, the central administration attempted to secure public order by making those people against whom a complaint had been lodged promise to do certain things and/or refrain from behaviors considered objectionable. Much of the relevant information must have been provided by the local kadis. In case the person -- or more often the community in question -- failed to abide by the promises made, the government imposed upon the defendants an obligation to pay a substantial amount of money (nezir). This obligation was confirmed ‘on site’ by the appearance of complainant and defendant in front of a kadi, who then issued a document (hüccet) which both sides could use in case of problems. We will analyze a hüccet of this kind, complicated by the intervention of a governor (1099-1100/1687-89, MAD 3912, p. 9). Sent out to repress ‘robbery and rebellion’ the latter was present at the hearing confronting the villagers of the districts of Banaz, Homa and Sand?kl? (near Afyonkarahisar) with groups forming part of the ‘Turkoman tents’ (hayme-i Turkoman). The nomads were represented by a large number of named representatives, while the villagers remained anonymous. The heads of the different tribal units (kabiles) admitted that numerous attacks including kidnapping and extortion had been committed and that in future they would assist in the hunt for the criminals concerned. In case of contravention the heads of the kabiles promised to pay sums of money ranging from 1000 to 4000 guru?. As for the ordinary members they constituted themselves guarantors (kefil). The undertaking was confirmed by the kadis of Sand?kl?, Banaz and U?ak. At the end of a lengthy procedure, the hüccet formed the basis of a document recorded in the Ba?muhasebe registers, while the version currently in our hands was a copy made from these latter registers. As we are dealing with an -- albeit official -- copy, the seals and signatures of the three kadis are nowhere in evidence. But the number of kabile heads and -- presumably – villagers involved remains as a testimony to their organizing and mediating skills.

This paper will explore the role of kadi in prosecuting crime in Istanbul during the eighteenth century based on Islamic court and police records. I will argue that as a result of the growing rate of crime and violence, the authority and jurisdiction of police expanded in punishing crime often without trials. The kadi’s role was diminished to gathering evidence and preparing a report to the imperial council. The Islamic court records for Istanbul contain very few cases dealing with serious crime. The punishment of crime fell under the jurisdiction of the imperial council headed by the grand vizier and presided over by the two kadiaskers of Anatolia and Rumelia and the chief judge of Istanbul. This period also witnessed the growing role of kanun (sultanic edicts) over the shari’a in the penal code. Nevertheless, the kadi continued to play an important role in gathering evidence, testimonies and ensuring fair legal procedure. He was often against the use of forced confession and torture. He often recommended a discretionary sentence. The hadd penalties had by and large disappeared by the eighteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, the kadi was only one official among many in prosecuting crime and meting out punishment long before the Tanzimat reforms. This is not to deny his central role in civil and municipal affairs well into the nineteenth century.

In 1734, the Maronite bishop of Beirut, `Abdullah Qara`ali (d. 1742), finished nearly two decades of work in assembling a revised legal code for his church. My presentation will use this legal code, and the Lebanese society in which Qara`ali spent his career, to test older assumptions about law and society in the pre-modern Middle East. One advantage in looking at the territories around Mt. Lebanon is that the population was unusually diverse: alongside a large Maronite community were substantial numbers of Druze, Sunnis, Shiites, and Orthodox Christians. The former 'standard model' of law and society predicts that each of these groups ought to have had its own distinct laws and courts. Thanks to recent scholarship, this straightforward set-up no longer seems so tenable. We now know, for example, that non-Muslims frequently resorted to the Islamic courts, run by the Ottoman state, in towns throughout the empire. In addressing the Lebanese case, my presentation will try to throw the spotlight on rural settings, where 80-90% of the Middle Eastern population lived anyway. Qara`ali’s legal code (entitled Mukhtasar al-Shari`a), read together with local narrative sources, suggests that rural law was quite different from what the old 'standard model' would imagine. Among the most curious features of his 'church law' is its striking resemblance, in both structure and vocabulary, to Islamic law. How should we explain these convergences? The temptation is to conclude that, by the eighteenth century, Maronite law had somehow been 'Islamized' through prolonged contact with neighboring Muslims. My argument is that this position is a misstatement of a far more interesting cultural interaction. It obscures the broader legal culture that Muslims and Christians essentially shared. Rooted primarily in oral custom, this 'folk law' legitimized itself, among both Muslims and Christians, with a legal idiom derived from Islamic law. This patina of Islamic terminology, which reflected the prestige of the Ottoman political order more than the 'influence' of the shari`a, helped to mask local usages and place them beyond criticism. My presentation will lay out the structure of the legal system around Mt. Lebanon, and then look at examples of the handling of personal matters such as marriage and inheritance.

In the last couple of decades, Ottoman history, like other fields of historical research, has been affected by the linguistic and cultural turns. At the same time and not unrelated to this influence, socio-legal approaches have been developed within Ottoman history. The latter change may be particularly discerned in sicill-based social history, a sub-field of study of Ottoman history which has been developed since the late 1960s. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the implementation of certain theoretical arguments, which were pursued in the wake of the linguistic and cultural turns into studies based on sicills (sharia court records), claiming that the contribution of such methods to nuanced interpretations of court records and historical documents in general is invaluable. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s observation (that titles this paper) regarding the way historians -- in her case, historical anthropologists -- should approach archives, this paper will focus on some new methods for studying sicills. My point of departure is that court records, or any historical documents for that matter, should not be treated simply as a collection of historical facts. I assume, instead, that form and content are interdependent. Hence, the entire context within which certain sicills were produced -- the court in question, its personnel, their interrelations and interactions with the legal administrative system and with the court users – require investigation as part and parcel of studying the texts of these sicills. Studying 19th-century court records from Palestine, the Ottoman legal reform that took place in this period, along with local transformation processes, will form major themes by way of illustrating contextualization of the sicills in question. In addition to court records, I will draw on legal and administrative instructions which the Ottoman government distributed to the provincial sharia courts, and personal files of judges and other court personnel from Müftüluk.