Orthodox Christians in the Kadı Courts: The Practice of the Sofia Sheriat Court, Seventeenth Century
TL;DR: The attitude of Balkan Christians to Ottoman rule has been subject to various, often contradictory, assessments as discussed by the authors, and one aspect of this subject, namely, the Christian attitude toward the sheriat court as a judicial institution, as reflected in kadi sicils from Sofia and other Balkan cities and in documents issued by Orthodox Christian ecclesiastical authorities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
Abstract: The attitude of Balkan Christians to Ottoman rule has been subject to various, often contradictory, assessments. In this essay I examine one aspect of this subject, namely, the Christian attitude toward the sheriat court as a judicial institution, as reflected in kadi sicils from Sofia and other Balkan cities and in documents issued by Orthodox Christian ecclesiastical authorities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Examination of these sources reveals that Christians frequently chose the sheriat judge over that of the church courts. In most cases this behaviour can be explained by the desire of the Christian litigants to seek out the court that would provide the most favourable solution to the dispute. The participation of Christians in sheriat court proceedings strengthens the impression that they did not avoid the sheriat court in practice, despite the hostility manifested by Christian religious authorities toward such behaviour. Indeed, the sources point to relatively smooth relations between the two communities in the Ottoman Balkan provinces in the period immediately preceding the national awakening of Balkan peoples.
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01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: The role of the Makhzan in the Moroccan legal system is discussed in this paper, where the authors present a glossary of Arabic and Hebrew terms for Moroccan legal systems and their use in the context of Sharïa Courts.
Abstract: ........................................................................................................iii Acknowledgements...........................................................................................vi Note on Transliteration and Names.........................................................................x Introduction.....................................................................................................1 Part I: Sharī‘a Courts Chapter 1: Between Batei Din and Sharī‘a Courts......................................................43 Chapter 2: Jews and Muslims in Sharī‘a Courts.........................................................68 Chapter 3: Crossing Jurisdictional Boundaries..........................................................118 Part II: The Makhzan as a Legal Forum Chapter 4: The Role of the Makhzan in the Moroccan Legal System...............................150 Chapter 5: Appeals to the Ministry of Complaints.....................................................181 Chapter 6: Collective Appeals to the Makhzan.........................................................227 Part III: Consular Courts Chapter 7: Foreign Protection and Consular Jurisdiction.............................................271 Chapter 8: Jews, Muslims, and Foreigners in Consular Courts.......................................294 Chapter 9: The Intervention of Foreigners...............................................................330 Epilogue......................................................................................................371 Glossary of Arabic and Hebrew Terms..................................................................379 Archives Consulted.........................................................................................382 Bibliography................................................................................................384
40 citations
Book•
06 Aug 2020
38 citations
01 Jan 2011
TL;DR: The early modern Ottoman Empire was a large agrarian empire wherein the interests of numerous groups and individuals converged around the land and its produce as mentioned in this paper, and the management of land as a resource has much to tell us about what governance was expected to be in this period, at a time before religious, economic, political or social authority had been disembedded from one another.
Abstract: This dissertation investigates the governance of seventeenth-century Damascus by examining claims upon the productive capacity of land, and the collection and redistribution of agricultural taxes. The early modern Ottoman Empire--of which Damascus was a province--was a large agrarian empire wherein the interests of numerous groups and individuals converged around the land and its produce. In light of its centrality to both the subjects and the state, the management of land as a resource has much to tell us about what governance was expected to be in this period, at a time before religious, economic, political or social authority had been disembedded from one another. In this, Damascus is not much different from any other provincial town lying within the early modern empires of Asia and Europe; the issues raised here are not pertinent to the history of the Middle East alone but are relevant to other early modern states. The inquiry into what the state governs and how it does so starts with the observation that Ottoman political literature conceives of a unified political body wherein different groups of people play different roles in allowing the state to function. Through the lens of tax assessment and collection, the first chapter examines the role within the Ottoman state body that is played by the peasant cultivators in the villages surrounding Damascus. The first half of the chapter explores how the prerogatives comparable to other fiscal military states shaped Ottoman taxation policy in the seventeenth century. The importance of obtaining cash led not only to the imposition of new taxes and updated tax registers at the Istanbul finance bureau, but to a new responsibility of the villagers for tax collection. The chapter argues that where compliance with taxation was concerned, the most important governing authority in the village was the villagers themselves. Examining the interactions between villagers, judges, muftis and tax farmers, the chapter examines how individuals and groups that are not state agents strictly speaking, become authorized to exercise state power. The chapter concludes that peasant cultivators do not merely maintain a relationship with the Ottoman government, rather, in some sense they are the government and form an integral part of its machinery.The question of how the governing authority of the state intersects with the authority of Islamic law has long been a question in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and Islamic societies in general. However, the question of shifts in the configuration of religious and temporal authority in the seventeenth century is not an issue whose importance is confined to the history of the Islamic regions of the world. Rather, the question of expanding state power and the proper role of `religion' in the body politic is a widespread concern of the early modern period. With this question in mind, the second and third chapters explore the changing legal powers of the sultan and his agents to control productive land and peasant labor. Chapter two notes a change in the meaning and scope of sultan's authority to legislate peasant access to the land in the seventeenth century. This expansion in the sultan's legislative role is absorbed into the jurisprudence of the empire's jurist-scholars, and creating a specifically `Ottoman' practice of Islamic scholarship. Starting in the sixteenth century, the sultan's enacted laws--known as `qanun'--regulate with far greater detail the rights and obligations of peasants and soldier-tax collectors. What emerges is a right of usufruct for the peasantry that is controlled by the dynasty's statutes rather than the interests of local military administrators or local custom. The fact that this concept of the usufruct right eventually comes to prevail in Damascene villages suggests that usufruct was an increasingly standardized right across the empire's rural communities. This is despite the fact that the Damascenes had their own local and juridical traditions that ran counter to the concept of usufruct being promulgated by the sultan. What we find in juristic discussion of usufruct is a very slowly changing idea of the boundaries of imperial authority and its legal consequences. While the second chapter demonstrates a growing consensus that the sultan had wider authority to legislate in matters pertaining to the lands of the state treasury, the legality of some land tenure practices sanctioned by the sultan remained controversial. The third chapter examines the limits of state power to pursue its need to fill the coffers, and how it was expected to treat the village taxpayers. There was no debate among Ottoman subjects that a solvent treasury was a necessity. Without exception, we find that keeping fertile land productive and distributing the revenues in appropriate ways are shared priorities. The common reference point defining the limits of the sultan's authority over production and taxation was the shari'ah, yet there was great disagreement on what the shari'ah enjoined, and in some sense, what the shari'ah was. When it came to what means of extraction the shari'ah permitted or the extent to which the state could coerce the villagers to produce, disagreement was rampant. It was not always the ulema (religious scholars) that opposed state actions on the grounds that such actions violated the shari'ah--as this chapter shows, the views of the ulema were sometimes more cooperative with the dynasty's decisions than those held by its temporal administrators. Both chapters address the question of the shifting configuration of state and religious authority in the early modern world, and examine its consequences on the lives and livelihoods of Damascene cultivators. The fourth and fifth chapters investigate two groups in Damascus who were frequent beneficiaries of the revenues produced in the villages, the ulema and the soldiers based in the city. The right of these groups to receive the tax moneys of the peasant cultivators was premised on the services that each provided for the political body as a whole. There did not appear to be much dispute about the nature of the services that each was to perform, but differences did spring up when the question arose of how or whether such services had been performed in specific instances. The chapter maintains that it is these conflicting interpretations of service, status, privilege and vocational responsibility that most clearly reveal how the provincial elites did or did not take part in the exercise of Ottoman authority in Damascus. The ulema earned their access to the revenue sources through their scholarship and teaching and the general duty of providing moral guidance to other Muslims. Part of this duty was to denounce oppression, and to protect the strong from abusing the weak. An argument arose among the ulema of how much honor or revenue one could seek from the state without compromising oneself in the process. Could one covet the sultan's largess and still be adequately critical if he or his agents overstepped their authority? Other ulema found that the dignity of their profession was an asset when their management of cultivators and taxes was called into question. They deflected the accusations of greed and fraud by invoking their dedication to pious works and scholarship. In all cases, the self conception of the ulema as a group with a particular function in the political body was critical to the way they responded to opportunities for gaining wealth and power. For the soldiers stationed in Damascus as well as the great military families of the countryside, access to rural revenues was contingent upon obedient military service. Increasingly, the entirety of the fiscal and military resources of the province of Damascus was oriented towards financing the pilgrimage to Mecca. The need for effective, reliable and obedient military leadership of the pilgrimage began to assume a higher priority for the Ottoman government. From 1660 to 1690, the Damascene janissaries dominated the office of pilgrimage leader, as they had a number of qualities to recommend them for the position: not only did know the routes from accompanying the caravan, but their capacity to create trouble as well as their expectation of reward was modest in comparison with the great military families of the countryside. Through investigation of their economic activities, it is clear that the question of which soldiers were considered `local' to Damascus had more to do with their involvement in the city's commerce rather than their origins or ethnicity. In turn, when the dynasty finally moved to destroy their leadership and punish them for insubordination, the question of how their `local' sympathies had affronted imperial prerogatives played out differently than might be imagined. While the issue of what constituted obedience might be read differently in Damascus than in Istanbul, it was clear that the Damascenes shared the belief that military men, even local military men, must be obedient to the sultan. This dissertation argues that Damascenes from all backgrounds play an important role in Ottoman governance of the province, and one that is comparable to that of other early modern subjects. It shows people trying to locate their place within the political body as a whole, while the limits of their duties and powers associated with different groups underwent great flux and were vigorously debated. It is this uneasy integration of these various groups into the body of state which best demonstrates the relations between the subjects and the state in the early modern Middle East.
29 citations
Dissertation•
30 Sep 2013
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied the construction of the marital bond and its dissolution with respect to the normative stipulations of the sharīʿa, social and moral constructions, and the cultural formations during late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Istanbul.
Abstract: This dissertation studies the construction of the marital bond and its dissolution with respect to the normative stipulations of the sharīʿa, social and moral constructions, and the cultural formations during late-eighteenth and early–nineteenth-century Istanbul. Through the examination of court cases, estate inventories, and contemporary chronicles, I demonstrate the strategies and practices that perpetrated possible patterns in the matrimonial union. Although Islamic law allowed for and encouraged the spouses to reconcile marriage-related negotiations outside of court, the amount of registered marital disputes indicates the central role of the court for spouses in establishing conciliatory grounds. This study explores in particular the consensual and purposeful use of the sharīʿa courts by women. The examination of the sicils from three different courts in intra muros Istanbul has shown that women were adamant about formalizing the consequence of marriage, divorce and property related discordances in hoping to secure their future interests. The dissertation essentially introduces the largely overlooked issue of the specialization of courts in this period and presents specifically the Dāvud Pasha court’s concentration on marriage and family-related disputes. By focusing on local practices and particularities through a case-by-case methodology, the study delivers a portrayal of Ottoman urban marriage structure within the context of the socio-legal and economic
26 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a novel database of Ottoman probates and examined some of the methodological difficulties that arise in very long-term analysis, spanning from 1460 to 1920 in the Ottoman Empire.
Abstract: This article uses a novel database of Ottoman probates and examines some of the methodological difficulties that arise in very long-term analysis. Wealth statistics, spanning from 1460 to 1920 in t...
20 citations
Cites background from "Orthodox Christians in the Kadı Cou..."
...Hence, the relative weakness of non-Muslim representation in western regions of the empire (Gradeva 1997; Kermeli 2007; Wittmann 2008; Papastamatiou 2017; al-Qattan 1996)....
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