James E. Baldwin (Royal
Holloway, University of London) published Islamic
Law and Empire in Ottoman Cairo with Oxford University Press in 2017.
From the publisher:
What did Islamic law mean in the early modern period, a world of great Muslim empires? Often portrayed as the quintessential jurists' law, to a large extent it was developed by scholars outside the purview of the state. However, for the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, justice was the ultimate duty of the monarch, and Islamic law was a tool of legitimation and governance. James E. Baldwin examines how the interplay of these two conceptions of Islamic law - religious scholarship and royal justice - undergirded legal practice in Cairo, the largest and richest city in the Ottoman provinces. Through detailed studies of the various formal and informal dispute resolution institutions and practices that formed the fabric of law in Ottoman Cairo, his book contributes to key questions concerning the relationship between the shari'a and political power, the plurality of Islamic legal practice, and the nature of centre-periphery relations in the Ottoman Empire.
Praise for the book:
"Drawing on a rich
variety of primary sources in both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, Baldwin provides
a very valuable reinterpretation of law and politics in Ottoman Egypt. In
particular, he convincingly challenges the image of the autonomous judge as the
pivot of Ottoman legal system, and instead argues that the judge should be
placed within a complex network of legal institutions with overlapping
jurisdictions. As a result a very rich and detailed picture of law and politics
emerges, a picture that illustrates the relationship between imperial center
and provincial societies, between shari'a and state power, and between sultan
and litigants. This is a very significant contribution to Islamic legal
studies, Ottoman history and scholarship on early-modern Egypt." -Khaled
Fahmy
Here is the Table of
Contents:
Introduction
1. A Brief Portrait of
Cairo under Ottoman Rule
2. Cairo's Legal
System: Institutions and Actors
3. Royal Justice: The
Divan-i Hümayun and the Diwan al-Ali
4. Government
Authority, the Interpretation of Fiqh, and the Production of Applied Law
5. The Privatization of
Justice: Dispute Resolution as a Domain of Political Competition
6. A Culture of
Disputing: How Did Cairenes Use the Legal System?
Conclusion: Ottoman
Cairo's legal system and grand narratives
Appendix: Examples of
Documents Used in this Study
Further information is
available here.
