A culture of disputing: how did Cairenes use the legal system?

Chapter 6 examines how Cairene litigants navigated the multiplicity of forums and practices with overlapping jurisdictions that constituted Cairo’s legal system. Moving away from the state-centric orientation of much Ottoman historiography, this chapter adopts the perspective of the legal consumer in order to discover how legal institutions were used, rather that the role the state intended them to play. The chapter emphasizes the lack of formal hierarchies or defined relationships between the different legal forums, and argues that this jurisdictional imprecision offered litigants opportunities to manipulate the system’s pluralism to their own advantage.

Royal justice: The Dīvān-i Hümāyūn and the Dīwān al-ʿĀlī

Chapter 3 examines in detail two institutions which represented the direct involvement of the empire’s executive authorities in the mundane administration of justice: the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn (Imperial Council) and the Dīwān al-ʿĀlī (Ottoman governor’s tribunal). The chapter demonstrates considerable overlap in the jurisdictions and caseloads of these institutions and the sharīʿa courts. It then seeks to understand the relationship between these institutions by focusing on the role of particular officials within them. In particular, it explores the role of the qāḍī, arguing that the qāḍī’s essential role was the determination of facts through the application of procedure, and that he performed this role within or on behalf of all of these institutions. Rather than representing an alternative form of justice, in line with some theories of maẓālim and siyāsa, the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn and the Dīwān al-ʿĀlī shared the same essential attitude towards evidence and proof as the sharīʿa courts.

Cairo’s legal system: institutions and actors

Chapter 2 gives an overview of the various institutions, actors and practices that made up Ottoman Cairo’s legal system. It discusses the sharīʿa courts, the Ottoman governor’s tribunal (al-Dīwān al-ʿĀlī), the Imperial Council (Dīvān-i Hümāyūn), the market inspector (muḥtasib), Janissary Āghā and associated officials, policing and punishments, Christian and Jewish courts, and the practice of mediation (ṣulḥ). The chapter portrays Cairo’s legal system as a complex network of overlapping forums and practices, in which jurisdictional boundaries were often obscure, and which offered litigants the ability to choose.

Government authority, the interpretation of fiqh, and the production of applied law

Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the Ottoman executive authorities attempted to influence and control the legal doctrines, drawn from fiqh, that were used in Cairo’s courts. Although the government could not produce fiqh, which was the domain of scholars, the authorities could shape applied law by intervening in the reading of fiqh, and instructing judges to favor particular doctrines from within the fiqh tradition. The chapter focuses in particular on one site where this occurred, Cairo’s madhhab pluralism, showing that the Ottoman authorities attempted to privilege Ḥanafī doctrines at several points, but often faced resistance from Egyptian scholars. As examples of this Ḥanafizing process, the chapter focuses on the issues of judicial divorce (faskh) and long-term rental contracts (al-ijāra al-ṭawīla). More broadly, the chapter argues that regardless of the debates about ijtihād and taqlīḍ, change in applied law was possible in pre-modern Islamic societies without doctrinal innovation, through manipulation of the diversity within the vast accumulated body of fiqh.

Introduction

The introduction sets the historiographical context for the book. It explains how the book’s arguments relate to the fields of Islamic legal studies and Ottoman history, and explores the concept of legal pluralism. It also provides an overview of the sources used in this study.

Conclusion: Ottoman Cairo’s legal system and grand narratives

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.

The privatization of justice: dispute resolution as a domain of political competition

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.

A brief portrait of Cairo under Ottoman rule

Chapter 1 gives an overview of Ottoman Cairo, covering demography, economy, religion, scholarship, culture, politics, and the city’s connections to the wider Ottoman Empire. It concludes with some comments on how law underpinned the life of the city.