Chapter 5 explores how Cairo’s political notables began to resolve disputes among the city’s population during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, encroaching on the jurisdictions of long-established Ottoman legal institutions. This development saw justice become enmeshed in the patron-client networks and factional antagonism of Cairo’s politics. Using contemporary chronicles, the chapter also explores what eighteenth-century Cairenes thought of their city’s legal system. It shows that in some cases, chroniclers were critical of the official courts’ passivity and cautious adherence to procedure, and saw powerful men using intelligence, cunning and violence to investigate wrongdoing as a superior guarantee of justice.
Dispute Resolution and Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah: Community Forum and Legal Acculturation in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam