Continuity and Transformation in Islamic Law

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This podcast explores murky boundaries in two senses. The first has to do with Anglo-Ottoman commerce and diplomacy in the early modern period. Like the more well-known case of the the British East India Company in South Asia, British diplomatic representation in Constantinople was also controlled by a corporate entity. Known as the Levant Company, the institution ensured that from the late 16th to the early 19th century there was little distinction between merchants and statesmen when it came to British diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire. The blurred lines gave way to what might be called a “cycle of necessity,” in which British diplomats gave gifts to secure commercial privileges for British merchants who would then fund the diplomats to provide gifts again. Yet the cycle did not always proceed smoothly, and discrepancies between translations of agreements often played a key role in hitches, in the process raising basic yet profound questions about what treaty-making meant. The second part of the podcast considers Ottoman maritime space and legal order more broadly. With respect to this theme, murkiness makes another appearance, this time as it related to the ability to possess or control the sea. What did it mean to draw a line across the waves, to differentiate between su and derya? Particularly in an age of imprecise mapmaking technologies, these efforts at delineation often were accompanied by a good deal of ambiguity, pointing to the complexity - if not always plurality - of legal cultures and claims to sovereignty that existed in the Ottoman maritime space and, indeed, that extended even ashore the well-protected domains as well.

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Original air date: 8 February 2014 | The capitulations, a series of bilateral agreements with European states and merchants, are sometimes held up as symbols of early Ottoman concessions to European powers and the beginnings of Ottoman economic decline. This misreading, which is in part the product of a misinterpretation of the word "capitulation" itself, impedes a proper understanding of Ottoman Empire and the legal context of the early modern Mediterranean. In this episode, Fariba Zarinebaf offers a different look at the capitulations or ahdnames within the broader context of law and diplomacy in Ottoman Galata and other port cities.

Original air date: 25 July 2012 | Groups variously labeled as nomadic and tribal formed an integral part of Ottoman society, but because their communities exercised a wide degree of autonomy, they are often represented as somehow separate or "other" to urban and settled populations. However, the social history of these communities reveals that tribes and their members were involved in the continual transformation of Ottoman society not just as a force of resistance or hapless victims of state policies but also as participants. In this podcast, Nora Barakat deals with the social history of such communities, which appear in the court records of Salt (in modern Jordan) as "tent-dwellers," and their place in the complex legal sphere of the Tanzimat era during which both shar`ia law courts as well as new nizamiye courts served as forums for legal action. Select Bibliography Agmon, Iris. Family & court: legal culture and modernity in late Ottoman Palestine. Syracuse, NY : Syracuse University Press, 2006. Kasaba, Reşat. A moveable empire : Ottoman nomads, migrants, and refugees. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. Mundy, Martha, and Richard Saumarez Smith. Governing Property: Making the Modern State Law Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Rogan, Eugene L. Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850-1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Rubin, Avi. Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Original air date: 18 February 2014 | Throughout most of the Muslim world, many of the affairs of religious minorities were historically governed by separate legal principles and courts, resulting in a state of legal pluralism. In practice, this created multiple forums for legal opinion that individuals irrespective of their religion could use for recording and resolving matters of business, family and property. In this episode, Jessica Marglin discusses her research on the relationship between Muslim and Jewish courts in Morocco during the nineteenth century. Jessica Marglin is an Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Alma Heckman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UCLA focusing on communist movements and Jewish politics in Morocco. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Palace of Justice, Tangiers c1900 Schroeter, Daniel J. Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Miller, Susan Gilson. "Dhimma Reconsidered: Jews, Taxes, and Royal Authority in Nineteenth-Century Tangier." In In the Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power and Politics in Morocco, edited by R. Bourqia and Susan Gilson Miller. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999, 103-126. Gottreich, Emily. The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco's Red City. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Marglin, Jessica. “La modernité juridique au Maroc ; protégés juifs, tribunaux consulaires, et droit islamique,” in La bienvenue et l’adieu ; Migrant juifs et musulmans au Maghreb (XVe-XXe siècle), Frédéric Abécassis, Karima Dirèche, and Rita Aouad, eds. (Paris and Casablanca: Séguier, 2012), v. 1, pp. 167-189. Kenbib, Mohammed. Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 1859-1948. Rabat: Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines, 1994. Al-Qattan, Najwa. "Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination." International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 31, no. 3 (1999): 429-444. Shahar, Ido. "Legal Pluralism and the Study of Shari‘a Courts." Islamic Law and Society 15 (2008): 112-41.

This episode is part of a series on Women, Gender, and Sex in Ottoman history

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The association of Algeria with sex figured prominently in the artwork and literature that was critiqued so famously by Edward Said in Orientalism. In this episode, Dr. Aurelie Perrier discusses the practical backdrop of this argument beyond the level of discourse by exploring illicit sex in 19th century Algeria under both Ottoman and French rule. Beginning with the fluid boundaries of Ottoman-administered sex work, she describes the transformations that accompanied French colonialism beginning in 1830. Contextualizing the sex trade in both eras with flows of labor migration, Perrier also illuminates the spatial dynamics of the French approach to prostitution, namely the birth of red-light districts and brothels. At once centralizing and segregating sex work, this new politics of space was intimately connected to the boundaries of race and class that were the premise of colonialism in the first place. Yet it appears in many cases these boundaries were transgressed, undermining the credibility of the colonial state. Moreover, even as the state claimed unprecedented control over the intimate lives of its citizens/subjects, people still managed to use the system for their own purposes, or evade it altogether. Still, the undeniable encroachment of the state left an indelible mark on Algeria's history with distinctly gendered implications.

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Hadi Hosainy ile 17. yüzyıl İstanbulu'nda kadın mülkiyet hakları üzerine konuştuğumuz bu podcastımızda kadınların hukuki yollara başvurarak nasıl kendilerini koruduklarına ve Osmanlı toplumunun şeri hukukun kadını dezavantajlı bir konuma iten kurallarının nasıl arkasından dolandığına değindik. Toplumsal cinsiyetin hukukun işleyişine etkilerini tartıştık.

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How have the immense transformations of the nineteenth century impacted Egyptian state and society? Our guest Dr. Khaled Fahmy has devoted much of his work to the study of that very question in the realms of military, medicine, and in this episode, law, which is the subject of his forthcoming book. In this episode, we explore the emergence to of new legal institutions under Mehmed Ali's government in Egypt and ask Dr. Fahmy what this meant for Egypt and how it fits into the broader changes afoot in the Ottoman world.

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The 1870 Crémieux Decree extended French citizenship to most, but not all, of Algeria's Jewish population. The Jews of the M'zab Valley were excluded from this legislation. As Professor Sarah Abrevaya Stein explains in this episode, this was due to a complex web of historical confluences including the chronology of conquest, shifting military and administrative structures for French Algerian rule, and perceptions of Jewish, Arab and Berber indigeneity. This story, while anchored in the local, participates in wider discussions of international Jewish philanthropies, decolonization, citizenship, belonging and marginality amid rapidly shifting global conditions.

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This episode is part of a series on Women, Gender, and Sex in Ottoman history

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Osmanlı'da çocukluk algısının  olup olmadığı son dönem tarih yazıcılığında sıkça sorulan sorular arasındadır. Bu bölümde Yahya Araz bize çocukların sadece küçük insanlar olmanın ötesinde Osmanlı'da çocukluk tanımının çerçevesini oluşturan toplumsal, hukuki ve biyolojik etmenleri anlatıyor.

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Tanzimat’in ilanıyla beraber gündelik hayatın pek çok alanına nüfuz etmeyi hedefleyen yasal uygulamalar eczane ve attar dükkanlarının tozlu raflarına kadar ulaşmayı başarmıştı. Bu bölümde Ebru Aykut, Tanzimat sonrası Osmanlısı'nda zehir satışını düzenleyen uygulamalarla kocalarıyla hesaplaşmayı zehir yoluyla seçen kadınların kesişen hikayelerini anlatıyor. 

Geç Osmanlı dönemi taşrasında suç ve cezalandırma pratiklerinin sosyal-hukuki tarihi üzerine çalışmalarını sürdüren Dr. Ebru Aykut, Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi Sosyoloji Bölümü'nde öğretim üyesidir. (academia.edu)

Yeniçağ Akdeniz ve Osmanlı İmparatorluğu üzerine uzmanlaşan Dr. Emrah Safa Gürkan İstanbul 29 Mayıs Üniversitesi'nde öğretim üyeliği yapmaktadır. (academia.edu)

Episode No. 164

Release date: 13 July 2014

Location: Koç RCAC, Istanbul

Editing and Production by Chris Gratien

Bibliography courtesy of Ebru Aykut

Citation: "Kocalarını Zehirleyen Osmanlı Kadınları," Ebru Aykut, Emrah Safa Gürkan, and Chris Gratien, Ottoman History Podcast, No. 164 (13 July 2014) http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2014/07/poison-murder-women-ottoman-empire.html.

Aykut, Ebru. Alternative Claims on Justice and Law: Rural Arson and Poison Murder in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire, Ph.d diss. (Boğaziçi University Atatürk Institute, 2011).

Aykut, Ebru. “Osmanlı’da Zehir Satışının Denetimi ve Kocasını Zehirleyen Kadınlar,” Toplumsal Tarih, no. 194 (Şubat 2010): 58-64.

Aykut, Ebru. "Osmanlı Mahkemelerinde Şüpheli Zehirlenme Vakaları, Adli Tıp Pratikleri ve Tıbbi Deliller," Tarih ve Toplum Yeni Yaklaşımlar, no. 17 (Bahar 2014): 7-36.

Bodó, Bela. “The Poisoning Women of Tiszazug,” Journal of Family History 21, no. 1 (January 2002): 40-59.

Imber, Colin. “Why You Should Poison Your Husband: A Note on Liability in Hanafî Law in the Ottoman Period,” Islamic Law and Society 1, no. 2 (1994): 206-216.

Robb, George. “Circe in Crinoline: Domestic Poisoning in Victorian England,” Journal of Family History 22, no. 2 (April 1997): 176-190.

Rubin, Avi. Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Shapiro, Ann-Louis. Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Müzik: Ayla Dikmen - Zehir Gibi Aşkın Var, Müslüm Gürses - Kadehinde Zehir Olsa, Samira Tawfiq - Ballah Tsabbou Halgahwe