Continuity and Transformation in Islamic Law

Episode 441

with Heather Ferguson

hosted by Zoe Griffith

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In this episode, historian Heather Ferguson takes us behind the scenes of early modern Ottoman state-making with a discussion of her recent book The Proper Order of Things. We discuss how the architecture of Topkapı palace, the emergence of new bureaucratic practices, and the administration of space from Hungary to Lebanon projected early modern discourses of “order” that were crucial to imperial legitimacy, governance, and dissent. Heather also offers rare insights into the challenges, vulnerabilities, and victories of transforming a dissertation into a prize-winning book manuscript.

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Bölüm 437

Leyla Kayhan Elbirlik

Sunucu Can Gümüş

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Osmanlı'da çiftler nasıl evlenir, nasıl boşanırdı? Bu podcast'te Leyla Kayhan Elbirlik ile İstanbul Bab, Davud Paşa ve Ahi Çelebi mahkemelerinin 1755-1840 yıllarındaki kayıtlarını inceleyerek tamamladığı doktora araştırması odağında, Osmanlı İstanbul'unda evlilik ve boşanma davaları üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Elbirlik'in araştırması, kadınların evlilik, boşanma ve mülkiyetle ilişkili konularda mahkemeleri aktif olarak kullandıklarını gösterirken, Osmanlı ailesinde ve toplumunda kadının rolüne dair yaygın kanıları da yeniden değerlendiriyor.

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Episode 430

with Nurfadzilah Yahaya

hosted by Chris Gratien

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During the 19th century, Southeast Asia came under British and Dutch colonial rule. Yet despite the imposition of foreign institutions and legal codes, Islamic law remained an important part of daily life. In fact, as our guest Fadzilah Yahaya argues, Islamic law in the region underwent significant transformation as a result of British and Dutch policies. But rather than merely a top-down transformation, Yahaya highlights the role of the small and largely mercantile Arab diaspora as a major factor in European policy towards Islamic law in Southeast Asia. In our conversation, we  discuss Islamic law and the Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia during the colonial period as well as some of the more unusual court cases arising from this period and the implications of this history for Southeast Asia today.

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Episode 345

with Will Hanley

hosted by Taylor M. Moore

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In this episode, Will Hanley transports us to the gritty, stranger-filled streets of the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, as we discuss his book, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria. We explore how nationality—an abstract tool in the pages of international legal codes—became a new social and legal category that tangibly impacted the lives of natives and newcomers to Alexandria at the turn of the twentieth century. We consider how nationality brought together the previously impersonal, stranger networks using an array of paper technologies, vocabularies, and legal practices that forged bonds of affiliations between the individuals and groups that inhabited the city. Finally, we discuss how Egyptians and non-European foreigners, such as Algerians, Tunisians, and Maltese, benefited or were disenfranchised from a legal hierarchy that privileged white, male Europeans.

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During the 1920s, a publisher in Lahore published a satire on the domestic life of the Prophet Muhammad during a period of religious polemics and communal tension between Muslims and Hindus under British rule. The inflammatory text soon became a legal matter, first when the publisher was brought to trial and acquitted for "attempts to promote feelings of enmity or hatred between different classes" and again when he was murdered a few years later in retaliation for the publication. In this episode, Julie Stephens explores how this case highlights debates over the meaning of religious and political liberties, secularism, and legal transformation during British colonial rule in South Asia. In doing so, she challenges the binary juxtaposition between secular reason and religious sentiment, instead pointing to their mutual entanglement in histories of law and empire.

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The changing of one's religion may be viewed today as a matter of personal spirituality or identity, but as the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere increasingly shows, conversion was often a public act with political, socioeconomic, and gendered components. In this episode, Elyse Semerdjian returns to the podcast to discuss her research on conversion in early modern Aleppo and how women sometimes utilized the act of conversion (or non-conversion) and the legal structures of the Ottoman Empire to gain the upper hand in familial and economic matters.

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The Capitulations are regarded as one of the most obvious and humiliating signs of European dominance over Ottoman markets and diplomatic relations in the 19th century, granting European merchants and their Ottoman protégés extensive extraterritorial privileges within the empire. In this podcast, Professor Omar Cheta probes the limits of the Capitulations in the Ottoman province of Egypt, where the power of the local Khedives intersected and overlapped with the sovereignty of the sultan and the capitulatory authority of the British consulate. Commercial disputes involving European merchants and their protected agents on Ottoman-Egyptian soil reveal the ambiguous and negotiable nature of jurisdiction and legal identities in the mid-19th century. These ambiguous boundaries provided spaces for merchants and officials to contest the terms of extraterritorial privileges. The creation of new legal forums such as the mixed Merchants' Courts gave rise to new norms and procedures, while reliance on Shari'a traditions continued to appear in unexpected places. 

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with Cengiz Kırlı hosted by Chris Gratien

Within Anglophone historiography, the Tanzimat period is conventionally represented as an era of centralizing reforms emanating from the imperial center that represent a trend often labeled as "modernization" or "Westernization." Less attention has been given to what these administrative changes meant in practice and how they were carried out in the different provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, Cengiz Kırlı discusses his work on various facets of the Tanzimat and its implementation, offering a preview of his new Turkish-language monograph on the "invention of corruption" in the Ottoman Empire and examining the interplay of local and imperial power during an the early Tanzimat period in the Balkans.

with Cengiz Kırlı

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Within Anglophone historiography, the Tanzimat period is conventionally represented as an era of centralizing reforms emanating from the imperial center that represent a trend often labeled as "modernization" or "Westernization." Less attention has been given to what these administrative changes meant in practice and how they were carried out in the different provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, Cengiz Kırlı discusses his work on various facets of the Tanzimat and its implementation, offering a preview of his new Turkish-language monograph on the "invention of corruption" in the Ottoman Empire and examining the interplay of local and imperial power during an the early Tanzimat period in the Balkans. (This podcast refers to visuals available below)

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Much of the scholarship on the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, which had its roots in the sociopolitical context of the 8th century Iraq, focuses on the early centuries of that school's development. Meanwhile, recent scholarship on the later periods emphasizes the transformations within the Hanafi jurisprudence in the early modern and modern periods, particularly as a result of the increasing role of the Ottoman state in the process of lawmaking. Dr. Samy Ayoub presents a different approach on Ottoman Hanafi jurists, who maintained the integrity of the legal discourse while recognizing the needs of the times. In this episode, Dr. Ayoub shares some of his reseach on the question of continuity and change under the self-desctibed “late-Hanafis” from the 16th century until the making of mecelle, the first attempt at codifying Islamic law, during the late 19th century.

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Original air date: 4 September 2015 | Within the historiography, major shifts and developments in schools of thought and legal interpretation have dominated the narrative of how Islamic law has spread and transformed across time. However, as our guest Guy Burak argues in his new monograph, The Second Formation of Islamic Law, structural changes in the relationship between state, society, and law are also an important part of this story. In this episode, Dr. Burak explains how law transformed under post-Mongol Islamicate empires such as the Ottomans through changes in the ways these states claimed legal authority. Guy Burak is the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Librarian at NYU's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. He is the author of The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2015). More at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2015/09/the-second-formation-of-islamic-law-guy-burak.html Episode No. 199 Release date: 4 September 2015 Location: RCAC, Istanbul Editing and production by Chris Gratien Bibliography courtesy of Guy Burak Music excerpts via archive.org and Free Music Archive: Murat Kenarinda (Egin Havasi) - Agyazar Efendi; Karaköy Balık Pazarı (Chris Gratien); Muzaffer Akgun - Ha Bu Diyar; Podington Bear Bibliography: Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Richard C. Repp, The Müfti of Istanbul: A Study in the Development of the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy (London: Ithaca Press, 1986). Abdurrahman Atcil, “The Formation of the Ottoman Learned Class and Legal Scholarship (1300–1600)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010). Colin Imber, Ebuʾs-Suʿud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 1997 ) ; Rudolph Peters, “What Does It Mean to Be an Official Madhhab? Hanafism and the Ottoman Empire,” in The Islamic School of Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress, ed. Peri Baerman , Rudolph Peters , and Frank E. Vogel (Cambridge, MA: Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2005), 147–58 Snjezana Buzov, “The Lawgiver and His Lawmakers: The Role of Legal Discourse in the Change of Ottoman Imperial Culture” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2005); Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective ( Albany : State University of New York , 1994 ) . Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez-Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration, and Production in Ottoman Syria (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), esp. chs. 2-3. Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).