Since the Mamluk sovereign al-Zahir Baybers (d. 1277) appointed four chief judges in Cairo representing the four Sunni schools of law, the different schools achieved a high level of independence, opening the doors for litigants and the legal establishment to utilize this system for utilitarian purposes. One technical term associated with the utilitarian use of the diversity of legal schools is talfiq, which is the putting together of two elements of different schools to create a new complex doctrine. I will first argue that contrary to common wisdom in the field, talfiq was used in the courts of the 17th and 18th centuries, i.e. prior to its use in 19th-century legal reforms in Egypt. Through the survey of 1001 cases from the Ottoman Egyptian courts of al-Bab al-'Ali, Misr al-Qadima and Bulaq, I show that families from different social strata used talfiq to facilitate their legal transactions, especially in cases of divorce, marriage and waqf (religious endowments). Sometimes more than one school was used in the same case to avoid a final dissolution of marriage. The Egyptian Ottoman court records also provide many examples of great jurists attending the legal process, observing those cases of talfiq, suggesting that legal theorists accepted this court practice in the eighteenth century. In the second part of the study, I engage the theoretical legal literature (usul al-fiqh) to explore the legal status of talfiq. I have found that not only did jurists' attitudes towards talfiq grow more permissive in the 17th and 18th centuries, that they also considered people's practice in the courts as a justification for the permission of talfiq in legal theory. I conclude that talfiq is not a modern innovation that was opportunistically employed by 19th century legal reformers to accommodate modernity as some scholars have argued, but it was part of the legal culture of the Ottoman period. I also argue that Islamic legal theory did not stand in opposition to social practice, but responded to, as well as shaped legal practice. Just as court cases cite the theoretical legal literature, legal theory in the Ottoman period referred to common practices.

In my paper I intend to explore a body of approximately 50 fatawa in Arabic gleaned from ten fetawa collections of Ottoman ?eyhhlislam. These fatawa are set apart from the other fatawa in the collections by their language (Arabic rather than Ottoman Turkish) and other stylistic conventions. The first fatwa examined in the paper was issued by the famous seyhelislam Kemal Pasazade within a generation or so after the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands (1516-1517). The last fatwa to be examined dates from early decades of the eighteenth century. Although scholars have noticed the existence of these fatawa, these fatawa have not been hitherto studied systematically. The fact that the question and the teyh?lislam's answer were written in Arabic (and preserved in Arabic in the collections) helps us to situate the fatawa in a concrete geographical setting and enables us to examine them along the Istanbul-Arab provinces axis. In this sense, the geographical and chronological context opens new possibilities for understanding the institution of the Ottoman chief mufti and the way this office was perceived by the empire's subjects in the Arab provinces. When read against the backdrop of the Ottoman conquest and incorporation of the Arab lands, the fatawa could shed new light on the some important dynamics that accompanied this process. More specifically, they reveal the attempts made by the Ottoman religious-judicial establishment to establish and consolidate the authority of the office of the ceyhflislam in the newly conquered territories. In my paper also examines several case studies, each of which demonstrate how Ottoman subjects in the Arab lands gradually learnt to make use the institution of the teyh lislam to promote their social, economic, and legal interests. On the other hand, the paper will draw attention to some of the challenges that the Ottoman religious-judicial establishment in general and the office of the imperial chief mufti in particular had to deal with and respond to in the wake of the competition with other local, provincial authorities.

Studies of Middle Eastern women have been dominated by debates over Orientalist assumptions about the passivity and exploitation of women. A distinction has often been made between Islamic legal doctrine, which guaranteed various rights to women, and actual legal and social practice, which involved the circumvention of the doctrine and the violation of women's rights. This paper attempts to take the issue beyond this dichotomous debate by examining legal practice in the area of inheritance during the Ottoman period and illustrating the ways in which it worked flexibly within the parameters of the doctrine. In Islamic law, women enjoyed the right to inherit, albeit lesser shares than their male counterparts. A strict application of the law led, inter alia, to the transfer of property out of the family, which was undesirable in an agrarian society. The legal mechanism of sulh (amicable settlement) provided a legitimate tool for the men to exclude women from enjoying their legal inheritance rights. Islamic law recognized this mechanism of communal dispute resolution, and laid down stipulations to ensure the legality of the process and outcome of sulh settlements. Takharuj, the amicable settlement by which an heir is excluded from inheriting a share of an estate in return for a consideration, appears to have been applied in practice more frequently to women, especially in cases of involving real estate. Focusing on Ottoman legal practice in Istanbul in the eighteenth century, the paper analyzes fatwa compilations of Ottoman shaykh ul-islams, comparing the rulings with the principles of inheritance and takharuj in the Hanafi fiqh literature. Its aim is to contribute to the understanding of the intricate relationship between legal doctrine and legal practice, and more specifically the legal dynamics that shaped the rights and status of women.

It is generally accepted that the official legal school in the Ottoman Empire was the Hanafi legal school and that the Ottomans appointed Hanafi judges to all parts of the Empire in order to ensure legal unity. On the other hand, we know that, after 1265, the Mamluks began to appoint chief judges from the four Sunni legal schools to Cairo, Damascus and other metropolitan cities of their kingdom in Egypt and Syria. These chief judges were independent from each other and reported directly to the Mamluk sultan. This system of "legal pluralism" enabled people to go to the judge of their own school and protected them from subjugation to the rule of other schools. By the time the Ottomans captured Syria and Egypt in 1516-7, the Mamluk legal system had been in place for more than two centuries. In this paper, I discuss the transition from the Mamluk "legal pluralism" to the Ottoman "legal unity" in the Arab lands after 1517 and show the development of Ottoman policy of reconciliation between local and central interests. Contrary to received wisdom, the Ottomans did not impose the Hanafi school in its entirety in every part of the empire. Legal opinions issued by the Ottoman chief jurists show that the legal school of the defendant determined the school identity of the judge who would hear the case. Even in Anatolia and the Balkans, the Hanafi judge was supposed to appoint a substitute judge from other schools to hear a case in which the defendant belonged to other schools. Thus, the Ottomans did not have any difficulty to keep the Mamluk legal system in the Arab lands intact. They appointed Hanafi judges from the center, and entrusted them with appointing substitute judges from other schools and supervising the courtroom. In other words, the judges of other schools maintained their positions, but their status changed. Different from the Mamluk period, when the judges of all schools were appointed directly by the Mamluk sultan, the judges of other schools came under the authority of the Hanafi judge during the Ottoman period. Thus, we can say that the Ottomans allowed the Mamluk "legal pluralism" to continue and local people to undertake the day-to-day functioning of the courtrooms. However, they insisted on appointing the Hanafi judges from the center and expected them to supervise the administration of justice in the region and safeguard imperial interests.