State, Society, and Law in Islam Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective
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Haim Gerber - Author
N/A Hardcover - 233 pages
Release Date: July 1994
ISBN10: 0-7914-1877-4 ISBN13: 978-0-7914-1877-2
Price: $31.95 Paperback - 233 pages
Release Date: July 1994
ISBN10: 0-7914-1878-2 ISBN13: 978-0-7914-1878-9
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Summary
The project of this work is very important. The author has read widely in the anthropology of law, not just Islamic studies, and consequently the book is one of the very few works on Islamic law that is grounded in more than merely textual scholarship. It is difficult to overstate the significance of Gerber's findings for legal studies, and for Ottoman studies." -- A. Kevin Reinhart, Dartmouth College
This book explores the legal structure of the Ottoman Empire between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries and examines its association with the Empire's sociopolitical structure. The author's main focus is on the relationship between formal Islamic law and the law as it was actually administered in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Istanbul and its environs.
Using court records, other primary archival documents, and little-used Islamic literature, Gerber establishes for the first time that large bodies of the law were indeed practiced and enforced as law. This refutes the ethnocentric Western view, propagated by Max Weber, that Islamic law was dispensed arbitrarily because of a widening gap between ossified Muslim law and a changing Muslim society. Gerber furthermore integrates his empirical research into a wider theoretical framework adapted from legal and historical-legal anthropology and uses this material as the basis for comparisons between the Ottoman Empire's legal system and other legal systems, most notably that of Morocco. This book shows that although Islamic law as practiced did have to contend with an inviolable sacred core, historical development nevertheless took place that can shed new light on the civilization of Islam.
Haim Gerber is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Islamic Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East and Islam, Guerrilla War, and Revolution: A Study in Comparative Social History
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Structure of the Ottoman Legal Process in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
2. The Making of Ottoman Law: The Rise of the Kadi and the Shari'a Court
3. The Fetva in the Legal System
4. The Guilds and Customary Law
5. Patrimonialism and Bureaucracy in the Ottoman Political System
