Islamic Law and Empire in Ottoman Cairo

245 Pages·2016·3.961 MB·English

by  James E. Baldwin

BALDWIN_redo.qxp_Layout 1 17/08/2016 17:48 Page 1
Islamic Law and
Empire in Ottoman Cairo
James E. Baldwin
ISLAMIC LAW AND EMPIRE
IN OTTOMAN CAIRO
For Helena
ISLAMIC LAW
AND EMPIRE IN
OTTOMAN CAIRO
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JAMES E. BALDWIN
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Abbreviations ix
Note on transliteration and dates xi
Introduction 1
1. A brief portrait of Cairo under Ottoman rule 20
2. Cairo’s legal system: institutions and actors 33
3. Royal justice: The Dīvān-i Hümāyūn and the Dīwān al-ʿĀlī 55
4. G overnment authority, the interpretation of fiqh, and the production
of applied law 72
5. T he privatization of justice: dispute resolution as a domain of political
competition 99
6. A culture of disputing: how did Cairenes use the legal system? 117
Conclusion: Ottoman Cairo’s legal system and grand narratives 136
Appendix: examples of documents used in this study 143
Notes 159
Map of Cairo in the eighteenth century 203
Glossary 204
Sources and works cited 210
Index 229
Acknowledgments
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began life as a PhD dissertation at New York University. My first debt
is to my advisers, Khaled Fahmy and Leslie Peirce, for their encouragement and
support over many years. Khaled introduced me to the archives in Cairo, he taught
me how to read court records at several levels, and he helped me to see the contem-
porary intellectual and political relevance of scholarship on Ottoman law. Leslie
helped me to step back from Egypt and think about the wider Ottoman connections
of my research, and she also taught me how to write, pushing me to tease out the
overarching point from a tangle of observations and giving me the confidence to
foreground and strengthen my own claims.
I would also like to thank all of the members of NYU’s departments of Middle
Eastern & Islamic Studies and History for the wonderful enriching graduate educa-
tion they gave me. In particular, I am grateful to Zachary Lockman for the support
and advice he has given me during and after my time at NYU, Michael Gilsenan for
his encouragement and regular hospitality, Sibel Erol for teaching me Turkish in
the best language classes I have attended anywhere, Everett Rowson and Bernard
Haykel for helping me read fiqh, Hasan Karatas¸ for teaching me to decipher Ottoman
documents, and Lauren Benton for reading my dissertation and giving me feedback
from a world historian’s perspective. NYU also had a very supportive graduate com-
munity, and I thank all of my friends and colleagues who provided encouragement,
conversation and criticism: On Barak, Robin Shulman, Kathi Ivanyi, Lale Can, Noah
Haiduc-Dale, Sarah Tunney, Peter Valenti, Irfana Hashmi, Jeannie Miller, Omar
Cheta, Guy Burak, Bas¸ak Tuğ, Ayelet Zoran-Rosen and Aaron Jakes.
I was fortunate to receive financial support from several organizations while
working on my dissertation and revising it as a book. The bulk of the research was
funded by a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship that allowed me to spend
two years in Cairo and Istanbul between 2007 and 2009. The Leverhulme Trust also
supported me when I returned to the UK as a postdoctoral researcher with an Early
[ vi ]
Acknowledgments [ vii
Career Fellowship. I’m very thankful to the Trust for its generosity and the freedom
to follow my interests that its grants have allowed. I’m also grateful to New York
University, which paid for my graduate education, and to NYU’s Department of
Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, which gave me several grants to spend summers
in Syria, Turkey and Egypt. I’m also grateful to Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal
Studies Program and to Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations
for visiting fellowships during which I did much of my thinking about how to turn
the dissertation into a book.
In the UK, I would particularly like to thank Yossi Rapoport, who has been a
mentor and friend since I moved back to London, supporting me to find a post-
doctoral and then a permanent position, and generally helping me to find my way
in British academia. Yossi helped me to think about how to reframe my narrowly-
focused dissertation on early modern Egypt to address historians of Islamic law more
broadly, and he read drafts of every chapter in this book. I would also like to thank
Miri Rubin for welcoming me to the wonderful history department at Queen Mary,
University of London, and Colin Jones for his advice and support while I was based
there. I’m grateful for the academic home Kate Fleet gave me at the Skilliter Centre
for Ottoman Studies in Cambridge during my final year of dissertation-writing. The
final stages of this book were completed in the supportive and dynamic environment
of the University of Warwick’s history department. I’d like to thank Maxine Berg
and Giorgio Riello for their encouragement of my work and for pushing me to think
in more global terms, and I’m especially grateful to Charles Walton for his advice,
friendship and hospitality.
Various other friends and colleagues have helped to see this book to completion,
by listening to my ideas, commenting on drafts, giving advice, or offering friend-
ship and support during my extended trips away from home: Jessie Barnes, Alan
Mikhail, Zaki Haidar, Denwood Holmes, Vanessa Larson, Brett Wilson and Cristina
Corduneanu-Huci, Terry Walz, Fiona Cameron, Andrew Robarts, Nur Sobers-Khan,
Abdurrahman Atçıl, Omri Paz, Dana Sajdi and Ariel Salzmann. Boğaç Ergene read
most of the book’s chapters in draft and then called me on Skype to discuss them.
I’d also like to thank Tony Greenwood and Gülden Güneri at the American Research
Institute in Turkey for hosting me during my first stint in Istanbul.
This book is informed in many ways by feedback and conversations at the work-
shops and conferences where I presented different parts of it. The list is extensive and
I’m grateful to the organizers and participants at all of them. In particular, I would
like to thank Khaled Fahmy and Amr Shalakany for organizing the conference on
Egyptian legal history in Cairo in 2009; Mathieu Tillier for organizing a fascinat-
ing conference on judicial pluralism in Beirut in 2011; all those who participated
in the panels I organized at the Middle East Studies Association meetings in 2011
and 2012, and Lale Can for co-organizing the 2012 one on petitions; Kent Schull
and Safa Saraçoğlu for organizing the all-day panel-athon on Law and Legitimacy
in the Ottoman Empire at the 2013 MESA, Nandini Chatterjee for including me in
her wonderful 2015 workshop in Exeter on legal documents in the Persianate world,
viii ] Acknowledgments
despite my inability to read Persian, and Michael Gilsenan for inviting me to his
productive and sociable law workshops at New York University over several years.
I’m very grateful to Nicola Ramsey at Edinburgh University Press for taking
on my book, and for her support and patience during its completion and the review
process. I’m also thankful to the peer reviewers for their extensive comments which
have refined many of the arguments in the book and greatly improved its presenta-
tion, and to Amir Dastmalchian whose meticulous copy-editing ironed out many
mistakes.
Lastly, I want to thank my family. My parents, Pam and Mick Baldwin, were
enormously supportive of my extended education and my long absences from the
UK. I’m grateful to them for their love and encouragement over several decades,
and for visiting me wherever I went. Most of all, I want to thank my partner Helena
Wright, without whom I would not have finished graduate school, let alone this book.
I don’t find it easy to write and there have been several occasions when I have almost
given up on finishing this project; Helena always offered emotional support and
imaginative practical solutions. The ideas in this book were all tried on her first, and
she is a ruthlessly effective editor. Now, she is also a wonderful mother to our chil-
dren Zachary and Rufus. I’m very lucky and very grateful for her love and support.
ABBREVIATIONS
ABBREVIATIONS
Archives
ENA Egyptian National Archive, Cairo (Dār al-wathāʾiq al-qawmiyya)
PMA Prime Ministry Archive, Ottoman Section, Istanbul (Bas¸bakanlık
Osmanlı Ars¸ivi)
Archival units, Egyptian National Archive
BA Sijillāt maḥkamat al-Bāb al-ʿĀlī
BS Sijillāt maḥkamat Bāb al-Shaʿriyya
DA Sijillāt al-Dīwān al-ʿĀlī
MQ Sijillāt maḥkamat Miṣr al-Qadīma
Archival units, Prime Ministry Archive
AS¸D Atik S¸ikayet Defterleri
DK Divan Kalemi
MK Mısır Kalemi
S¸D S¸ikayet Defterleri
S¸K S¸ikayet Kalemi
Published sources
Awḍaḥ A ḥmad Shalabī ibn ʿAbd al-Ghanī, Awḍaḥ al-ishārāt fī man
tawallā Miṣr min al-wuzarāʾ wa ʾl-bāshāt, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1978).
[ ix ]