scholarly journals An Analysis on the Operations and Functions of a Sharīʿah Court: the Case of Ottoman Üsküdar (1547-1551)

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-219
Author(s):  
Faika Çelik

Through a close reading of a single register found in the sixteenth-century court record series of Üsküdar, this article introduces the reader to the operations of the Sharīʿah court of Üsküdar and its records from 1547 to 1551. By approaching the court records as both “text” and “document,” it explores the functions of the court, identifies the court officials, defines their roles, and delineates the role played by the qāḍī, his court and the local community in the administration of justice. This article can be read as a contribution to the newly emerging literature on variations in the Sharīʿah courts in the Ottoman Empire in terms of their operations. As the recent literature including this present study demonstrates, the duties of the local Sharīʿah court in the Ottoman Empire are neither singular nor monolithic. While some of the courts provided notarial and administrative services primarily, others acted as significant sites for dispute resolution. Hence their operations were primarily judicial. What emerges from this study is that the court of Üsküdar in the very middle of the sixteenth century primarily functioned as a “public registry.”

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kemal Çiçek

AbstractAlthough the question of interpreters (tercüman) in the Ottoman empire has been a popular subject in recent writing on Ottoman history, the interpreters of the courts of the qadi (mahkeme tercümanlarι) have remained a mystery. Pioneering researchers of the sijills have mentioned their presence in court, but have been unable to establish their existence or explain the silence of the records about their position. In this essay, I analyse documents found in the sijills of the province of Nicosia, Cyprus, in order to explore the work of the translators who were charged with helping people on trial who did not know Ottoman Turkish. The court interpreters assisted the qadi and played an important role in the administration of justice, especially with regard to non-Muslims. The presence of interpreters in the qadi court of Nicosia helped the qadi to administer justice among dhimmis and gain their confidence, which may explain the frequency of references to them. Based on some berats (documents issued by the diwans) recorded in the sijills, I examine the identity, appointment, and the legal status of court interpreters.


1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Seng

AbstractAs one of the most immediate sources for the study of community life, the shariah court records of Istanbul capture one of the underlying characteristics of Ottoman society at the beginning of the sixteenth century, that of social and spatial mobility. This characteristic is clearly illustrated in the case of slaves. Records concerning fugitive slaves and slaves who resided in the region, either as freedmen or in servitude, clearly indicate that slavery helped fuel the economy of empire and, upon manumission, slaves were readily absorbed into local communities. The institution of slavery was an integral part of both Ottoman society and local community life and was used not only by the palace but by a wide variety of residents, across a range of socio-economic levels.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Vivienne Dunstan

McIntyre, in his seminal work on Scottish franchise courts, argues that these courts were in decline in this period, and of little relevance to their local population. 1 But was that really the case? This paper explores that question, using a particularly rich set of local court records. By analysing the functions and significance of one particular court it assesses the role of this one court within its local area, and considers whether it really was in decline at this time, or if it continued to perform a vital role in its local community. The period studied is the mid to late seventeenth century, a period of considerable upheaval in Scottish life, that has attracted considerable attention from scholars, though often less on the experiences of local communities and people.


Author(s):  
Anna Shapoval

Analysis of linguocultural aspect of temporal nominations is impossible without involving the problems of hrononymic lexics. Chrononyms is an important information resource of a certain linguaculture, some distinctive peculiarities of conceptual picture of the world. The aim of the experimental analysis is a complex examination of the linguacultural aspect of temporal nominations that function in Chinese and Turkish languages reflecting the concepts of the world. The research was based on the material of the novels “Imperial woman” by Pearl Buck and “Roxolana” by Pavlo Zagrebelniy. The analysis of recent scientific publications allowed us to come to the conclusion that the investigation of hrononymic lexics can involve different theoretical and practical principles. Being guided by the existing classifications of chrononyms (N. Podolskaya, M. Torchinsky, S. Remmer) the linguocultural features of the following types of temporal chrononymic lexical units were identified and studied in the research: georthonyms, dynastic chrononyms, tumultonyms, parsonyms and mensonyms. The results of the research demonstrate that not all lexical units of temporal denotation chosen from the above mentioned novels refer to the class of chrononyms. The group under investigation includes the following lexemes: nominations of the lunar calendar, nominations of the solar calendar, nominations of mixed calendar and temporal slots denoting day and night. The basic system of chronology in the linguiacultures under analysis is the dominance of the lunar calendar nominations (Chinese picture of the world — 51,0 %, Turkish — 40,4 %). In the analyzed works the nominations of the solar calendar are used less often in the Chinese picture of the world; the usage of this unit reaches 20 %, and this phenomenon is historically conditioned. Mixed calendar nominations (21 % of temporal units) are rather common, solar calendar nominations are refined by the monthly calendar; it can be explained by the fact that the Chinese mind is conservative towards the new temporal system. In the Turkish picture of the world 45 % of temporal vocabulary belongs to the solar calendar since in the sixteenth century only a lunar calendar operated in the Ottoman Empire. It should be mentioned that significant place in the temporal vocabulary of “Roxolana” is conditioned by the influence of the linguistic personality of the author, who was a Ukrainian.


1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Finlay

AbstractThree prophecies current in Istanbul in the summer of 1533 pointed toward the imminent destruction of the Ottoman empire by Christian powers. One of the predictions stated that Alvise Gritti, the bastard son of the doge of Venice, would bring about the ruin of the Ottomans. A confidant of Sultan Srlcyman and the grand vizier, Gritti was deeply involved in the war of the Ottomans against Charles V of the Spanish-Habsburg empire, as a commander of Ottoman troops, advisor on Western affairs, and governor-general of the Hungarian kingdom. Widely detested by Ottoman officials, however, Gritti felt that his power was waning in 1534. In response, he perhaps was inspired to play out his prophetic role, for he told an ambassador of Charles V that he would help the emperor's forces capture Istanbul while Sultan Süleyman was away at war. Millenarian speculation was widespread in the early sixteenth century, but sometimes it had direct consequences inasmuch as it came to figure in the calculations of political actors. Examination of the prophecies of 1533 within the context of the time nicely illustrates how prophecy and politics could have a reciprocal relationship, with the former being tailored to the occasion and the latter responding to apocalyptic foreboding.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 422-456
Author(s):  
Yuan Julian Chen

Abstract This article studies two sixteenth-century Asian texts: Khitay namah, a Persian travelogue about the Ming dynasty written by the Muslim merchant Ali Akbar and presented to the Ottoman sultan, and Xiyu, an illustrated Chinese geographical treatise with detailed travel itinerary from China to Istanbul by the Ming scholar-official Ma Li. In addition to demonstrating the breadth of Ottoman and Chinese knowledge about each other in the global Age of Exploration, these two books, written respectively for the monarchs of the self-proclaimed Islamic and Chinese universal empires, reflect the Ottoman and Chinese imperial ideologies in an era when major world powers aggressively vied for larger territories and broader international influence. Both the Ottoman and Chinese authors recast the foreign Other as the familiar Self – Ali Akbar constructed an Islamized China while Ma Li depicted a Sinicized Ottoman world – to justify their countries’ claims to universal sovereignty and plans for imperial expansion. Like many contemporary European colonial writers, Ali Akbar’s and Ma Li’s exploration of foreign societies, their literary glorification of their own culture’s supremacy, and their imposition of their own cultural thinking on foreign lands all served their countries’ colonial enterprise in the global Age of Exploration.


Balcanica ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 43-55
Author(s):  
Dragana Amedoski

The role of the vaqf in the Ottoman Empire, as in the whole Islamic world, was quite significant, especially in a period marked by the founding of new orien?tal settlements. The first endowers in the newly-conquered lands were sultans, begs and prominent government officials. Affluent citizens also took part in endowing their cities, and women are known to have been among them. The aim of the paper, based on Ottoman sources, is to shed light on the participation of Muslim women in this kind of humanitarian and lucrative activity using the example of the Sanjak of Krusevac (Alaca His?r) in the sixteenth century.


2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacopo Crivellaro

This essay analyses the legal regime of Capitulations in Egypt at the apogee of European abuse of the privilege in the Nineteenth Century. Capitulations were trade oriented prerogatives granted to the European merchants by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century. With the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, the privileges were gradually extended to the point that they awarded foreigners substantial immunity from local jurisdiction and legislation. Once Egypt acquired a greater self-governing status with the successful campaigns of Mohammed Ali, the Capitulatory texts were further enlarged by a substantial body of customary law. Custom operated to exempt Western citizens from compliance with local legislation and immunize them from local jurisdiction. The custom acquired an even more aggressive stance when foreign residents were permitted to sue local defendants and request the application of the foreign resident’s law. Essentially, Consular tribunals, by administering an inequitable consular justice often in favour of the foreign party eviscerated the local judicial system of any authority. The practice only subsided with the institution of Mixed Courts of Jurisdiction in 1876 and the Montreaux Convention of 1936.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks

Abstract This paper analyzes data from customs accounts in Transylvania from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth on traffic in textiles and textile products from the Ottoman Empire. Cotton was known and commercialized in Transylvania from the fifteenth century; serial data will show that traffic in Ottoman cotton and silk textiles as well as in textile objects such as carpets grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century. Customs registers from that period also indicate that Poland and Hungary were destinations for Ottoman imports, but Transylvania was a consumer’s market for cotton textiles.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 114
Author(s):  
Agung Kurniawan ◽  
Muhammad Chabibi ◽  
Renny Sari Dewi

Current web-based administrative services are not only for government at the city or regional level, but now the village also needs it to support its government activities. According to Law No. 6 of 2014 the village is a legal community unit that has the territorial boundaries that are authorized to regulate and administer government affairs, the interests of the local community based on community initiatives, original rights, and / or traditional rights that are recognized and respected in the Republic of the Republic of Republic's government system. Indonesia. In the current technological era, there are many services for villages that use and utilize information technology so that the service process becomes easier, more transparent and faster. For this reason, in this study we had the opportunity to develop a web-based Village Service Information System in Leran village, in developing the system this time we used a prototyping method. This system will have several features, including: making independent reports, submitting a letter of introduction from the village and online, making a biodata of the village community, and also containing the profile of the village of Leran. The results of this research are a village service information system that can help the work of government officials in the village of Leran, and also facilitate the villagers in obtaining information about services or other information in the village of Leran.


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