“Off the Straight Path” is a highly original work on adultery, immorality and offences against public order in the Ottoman Empire, with empirical evidence from Aleppo, one of the Empire's major provincial capitals. Some of the less obviously attractive features of Islam are what are generally termed the hadd punishments, which variously mandate the amputation of limbs, stoning or execution, for theft, adultery, murder and so on. In her examination of some 300 years of the court records of Aleppo (combined with evidence from a survey of research in other parts of the Empire), Dr Semerdjian was unable to document a single verdict of stoning for adultery, or sex outside marriage, showing that this punishment was never actually imposed, at least during the Ottoman period. This is far more than a simple historical curiosity, since extremists in many Muslim countries are now calling for the “strict application of shariʿa law”, unaware, or perhaps unwilling to acknowledge, that the practical working of the legal system was much less relentless than such advocates would have us (and their followers) believe.

The book discusses zina (adultery/sex outside marriage) in Islamic and Ottoman law. Essentially, as in, for example, the code of Hammurabi (p. 18) the Islamic marriage contract made the wife the property of the husband, which meant that adultery or rape was equated with theft or taking illegal possession; the mahr, or dowry, confirms ownership. In the Ottoman period, the sultans issued qanun-name(s), regulations that the (Islamic) courts had to enforce, mainly although not exclusively on matters not covered in the Quran or elsewhere in the Islamic tradition. Many qanun-name(s) have survived, and are important indicators of the practical application of the law, as have books of fatwas, decisions by Islamic legal specialists, muftis.

All this has other important implications, as Dr Semerdjian is well aware: in the received version of Sunni Islam, it was held that what is called the “gateway of interpretation” (bāb al-ijtihad) was closed in the tenth century. As Dr Semerdjian's account convincingly shows, this is simply inaccurate: both the legislation produced by the Ottoman state and the many books of fatwas demonstrate that as far as the laws of the Empire were concerned, the system was in no sense fossilized, until, ironically, the European-influenced publication of the various Ottoman codes of law during the tanzimat reforms of the nineteenth century.

To an important extent, the court records provide ample evidence of the daily functioning of the law as it affected the lives of Ottoman subjects. Chapter 3, “The Shariʿa court record and social history”, contains a path-breaking discussion of the methodological problems and the limitations inherent in the utilization of court records as the raw material of social history. The discussion of the pros and cons of using or relying on this kind of primary source is one of the most sensible I have seen, and I shall certainly add those pages to my collection of readings on the urban social history of the period.

Dr Semerdjian also emphasizes the primary role of the community in bringing offenders against public order to court. Ottoman cities were policed in only the most rudimentary manner, with the result that a consistent feature of the cases she describes was the presence in court of a large numbers of petitioners, or complainers, all living in the quarter (hara) in which the offences took place, making the case that the defendant(s) was/were engaged in some kind of dishonourable conduct (too much noise, the presence of women and women together who are not related to each other, solicitation by prostitutes, the procuring of prostitutes, and so on). This evidence also makes an important contribution to current debates about the extent to which the Ottoman Empire was a highly centralized state; in this particular situation at least, “the people” are apprehending the wrongdoer. As she says, “Through the examples of quarter solidarity … the informal grass-roots mechanisms for policing moral breaches become clearer” (p. 93).

In chapter 4, Semerdjian shows us the penalties that the courts actually prescribed. Most of the cases she considers resulted in nothing more than banishment of the defendants from the city quarter, an early example of the not-in-my-back-yard principle. This was justified by the argument of istihsan, the principle of reconciling the law with the practice of everyday life and the general interest of the community; the word is constantly used in the seventeenth and eighteenth century fatwa collections. Prostitution, though a social nuisance, was evidently a fact of life, especially in a large garrison city like Aleppo, and certainly did not merit violent, still less capital, punishment. That this kind of flexibility was possible shows the vitality of the principle of ijtihād mentioned above.

The final chapter deals with domestic violence, and although Semerdjian has found only a relatively small number of cases, it is clear that they too do not conform to stereotype. The courts certainly regarded wife beating and rape as reprehensible, although one of the oddities of the evidence is that many rape victims appeared in court several months pregnant. Nevertheless, women did have the courage to prosecute rapists in court, in spite of the fact that they found it difficult to produce convincing evidence. On a personal note, I have just completed an edited book, The Urban Social History of the Middle East c 1750–1950, (Syracuse University Press, 2008): I wish that I had had access to Semerdjian's manuscript before mine went off to the publisher, as her book adds several fascinating dimensions to discussions of the practical application of Islamic law in an urban context.