Conclusion: Ottoman Cairo’s legal system and grand narratives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
Islamic Legal History

The conclusion reflects on the implications of the book’s findings for longer-term narratives of Islamic legal history and Ottoman history. Drawing on recent studies of the medieval period and the nineteenth century, the chapter sketches a revised grand narrative of Islamic legal history in which political and military officials play a much more prominent role, and the modernizing reforms of the nineteenth century build on indigenous precedents as well as western influences. The conclusion also refines the prevailing model of decentralization in the historiography of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Although the imperial government often found itself unable to impose its will on powerful provincial elites, provincial subjects continued to demand the intervention of imperial institutions, in particular legal institutions, into their affairs. In many ways, Istanbul’s authority in Egypt was invited, rather than imposed.

Law, Lawyers, and Humanism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Distinguished Career ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Selection Of

The first of two volumes, this collection of essays on Scots law represents a selection of the most cited articles published by Professor John W. Cairns over a distinguished career in legal history. It is a mark of his international eminence that much of his prolific output has been published outside of the United Kingdom, in a wide variety of journals and collections. The consequence is that some of his most valuable writing has appeared in sources which are difficult to locate. This collection covers the foundation and continuity of Scots law from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland through the eighteenth-century influence of Dutch Humanism into the nineteenth century and the further development of the Scots legal system and profession.

scholarly journals A Legal History of the New Zealand Jury Service - Introduction, Evolution, and Equality?

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Michèle Powles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Jury Service ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jury System ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Service Introduction

This article traces the development of the New Zealand jury system. Most noteworthy in thisdevelopment has been the lack of controversy the system has created. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of equality in the legal system generally led to debate and reform of juries in relation to representation, race and gender.

Geopolitics of Comparison: World Literature Avant la Lettre

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Semantic Mapping of An Ottoman Fetva Compilation: EBUSSUUD Efendi’s Jurisprudence through a Computational Lens

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-115
Author(s):  
Boğaç Ergene ◽  
Atabey Kaygun
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Semantic Mapping ◽  
Textual Space ◽  
Islamic Legal History

Abstract Fetva collections are important sources for Islamic legal history. However, few scholars have considered a particular collection of fetvas or the fetvas of an individual jurist as specific areas of legal and historical exploration. Instead, most researchers use fetvas selectively and instrumentally, that is in (at best) small groups, and in their explorations of various other topics. This article proposes computational methodologies that could characterize the contents of a 6,000-fetva corpus by an important Ottoman jurist, Şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi (d. 1574), to reveal its substantive composition and range. The article conceptualizes a previously uncharted textual space in a way similar to how a map depicts a geographical one. By doing so, it also provides insights into Ebussuud’s jurisprudential legacy and the major socio-legal concerns and anxieties in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century.

Provocative Wealth: Non-Muslim Elites in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
Maurits van den Boogert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Legal System ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
The Status ◽  
Common Notion ◽  
The Common ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractIn the Western sources, the Ottoman legal system is often portrayed as unreliable and incidents of Europeans or Ottoman protégés of Western embassies and consulates who claimed to have been maltreated abound. These reports strengthened the common notion in Europe that Ottoman government officials were rapacious and corrupt. The article challenges these views by analyzing two incidents from 18th-century Aleppo, which shed light not only on the dynamics of Ottoman-European relations on the ground, but also on the status of non-Muslim elites in the Ottoman Empire.

Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic

PMLA ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 114 (5) ◽  
pp. 1043-1054 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gamer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Charles Robert Maturin ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Matthew Lewis ◽  
Charlotte Dacre ◽  
History Of

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

Tracing the History of the Legal System in India

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Mahendra Pal Singh ◽  
Niraj Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law

Examination of Indian legal history illustrates the presence of multiple legal orders that coexisted in India through the ages. Moreover, certain ‘modern’ conceptions of law were present in similar forms in India before the medieval period, contrary to Western assumptions. Largely ignoring these legal traditions, the British attempted to re-give law and legal systems to the Indians. This was part of the larger project of ideologically justifying the presence of the British Raj in India. The British used India’s extant legal diversity to argue for the lack of a dominant legal tradition, leading to the introduction of British common law as the law of the land.

scholarly journals Islam in West Africa

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-93
Author(s):  
Ahmed Sheikh Bangura
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Volta Basin ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Systems

Islam in West Africa is a collection of nineteen essays written by NehemiaLevtzion between 1963 and 1993. The book is divided into five sections. dealingwith different facets of the history and sociology of Islam in West Africa.The first section focuses on the patterns, characteristics, and agents of thespread of Islam. The author offers an approach to the study of the process of thatIslamization in West Africa that compares pattems of Islamizacion in medievalMali and Songhay to patterns in the Volta basin from the seventeenth to thenineteenth centuries. He also assesses the complex roles played by Africanchiefs and kings and slavery in the spread of Islam.Section two focuses on the subject of lslam and West African politics fromthe medieval period to the early nineteenth century. Levtzion identifies twotrend in African Islam: accommodation and militancy. Islam's early acceptancein West African societies was aided by the fact that Islam was initially seen asa supplement, and not as a substitute, to existing religious systems. Levtzionanalyzes the dynamics of Islam in African states as accommodation gave wayin time to tensions between the ruling authorities and Islamic scholars, callingfor a radical restructuring of the stare according to Islamic ideals. The tensionsbetween the Muslim clerics of Timbuktu and the medieval Songhay rulers. andthe ultimately adversarial relationship between Uthman dan Fodio and the Gobirleadership in eighteenth-century Hausaland, are singled out for sustained analysis ...

scholarly journals Crossing the Mediterranean

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Ozan Ozavci
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eastern Question ◽  
The Will ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter discusses that the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 epitomized a discursive practice in the Levant. European Great Powers of the time looked to supply security beyond their imperial territories by military expeditions, allegedly for the benefit of the locals even if against the will of the regional sovereigns—in this case, the Ottoman imperial rulers. The architects of the 1798 occupation, Bonaparte and Talleyrand, portrayed their expedition as a ‘service’ the Ottoman Empire. But, in reality, the 1798 expedition was the outcome of decades long debates in France. It ultimately resulted from a diverse set of geostrategic, political, economic and financial determinants that defined the Eastern Question in the late eighteenth century. What exactly did the Eastern Question pertain to before the nineteenth century then? And how did 1798 relate to it?

Introduction

2010 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Yaron Harel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
External Balance ◽  
Western Influences ◽  
Transitional Phase

This chapter talks about how the Syrian Jewish community as one sector of the variegated Ottoman mosaic experienced the changes sweeping the empire. It looks at the eighteenth-century exposure of Aleppine Jews to western influences. It also notes how the eighteenth century in the Ottoman Empire can be identified as a transitional phase containing traditional and new elements, which eventually gave way to more thoroughgoing westernization and modernization in the nineteenth century. The chapter discusses how Albert Hourani's characterization of the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire that transitions in both the internal and external balance of power. It analyses the European–Ottoman relationship that had been grounded in military and diplomatic equality.

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