This volume of fine and impressive articles seeks to make a contribution to the study of Arabic court records of Syria in Ottoman times.

The editors say in the introduction that the purpose of the book is to present studies by younger scholars, who suggest new paradigms for the study of Ottoman sijills, or qadi court records, hailed as the best source for the study of Ottoman law. The main paradigm shift suggested is to criticize and go beyond the older generation of Ottoman sijill scholars, who are said to have made the mistake of treating the sijill documents as transparent, that is, as a data bank and no more. This was problematic, since the sijill was not a source intended for historians, and hence should itself be a text to be analysed. Stronger versions of this criticism claim that it was a grave mistake to assume that the qadi was a benign judge, interested mainly in justice for the simple folks. The qadi had his own agenda in each and every case brought before him, and it was the main task of the historian to unlock this code. This writer comes from the Ottoman Turkish culture area of sijjils, but belongs to the same generation of obsolete historians, and is also a target of critical comment in several of the papers in the book. This is perfectly legitimate, but it is perhaps too soon to forget scholars such as Andre Raymond, Abdul-Karim Rafeq and Abraham Marcus, to name just a few. What I argue in defence of the old guard is that generally I am not at all against the “new (sijill) historians” on a theoretical level. But it seems to me that what they have assumed is next to impossible to achieve and, more importantly, that their obsession with it blocks from sight a whole range of important topics that will have to wait another generation before returning to fashion (the status of minorities; the nature of Ottoman–Islamic substantive law, its relation to Islamic law in general and to change in particular, to name just a few). Indeed, the sijill was not an intended source; an intended source was the chronicle, for example those early Ottoman chronicles that portrayed the house of Othman as reaching all the way back to Biblical Noah! (All sources are biased.) More concretely, exposing the personal agenda of an Ottoman qadi – if such existed, which for the most part I doubt – would be practically impossible, since the sijill is based on summaries, not verbatim reproduction of what went on in court. If the qadi was subject to pressures by litigants, witnesses and court employees, or Ottoman officials, these are never reflected in the text we are given to read. To add your own version of the truth as the truth is a procedure I, for one, do not accept.

In the remaining space I will survey just a few of the papers in the book, those more relevant to the aforementioned discussion of the qadi.

In Chapter 3 Brigitte Marino deals with the problem relating to the division of an estate between three heirs, when it becomes apparent that the deceased had, before his death, sold half a house to his wife, and the other heirs tried to challenge this transaction. They failed in this, and the author suggests the interpretation that they succeed because they come better prepared with the right documentation and witnesses. This is clearly an example of a straightforward approach, without searching to find fault with the work of the qadi.

In Chapter 5 Charles Wilkins studies the role of witnesses in the workings of the qadi court of late eighteenth-century Aleppo, where court employees such as bailiffs, and others, fulfilled their roles and then went on to serve as shuhud al-hal, court witnesses. The author is led to conclude that the shuhud in Aleppo were not like those of seventeenth-century Kayseri, people who happened to be in court on the day of the trial, but rather, like the shuhud of Ayntab, who were among the notables of the town, who may well have controlled the court as well.

In Chapter 6, Stefan Knost discusses the usual question of whether the qadi operated rationally and by the law, or whether actors working behind the scenes swayed him in this or that direction. The discussion is on a waqf in late eighteenth-century Aleppo, which had been a waqf in favour of a takiyya since time immemorial. Three people challenge that assumption and claim that the famous Uzun Hasan has dedicated this waqf to their family. The qadi decides in favour of the takiyya, eliciting from the writer the comment that perhaps in the psychology of the city dwellers, public waqfs enjoyed an advantage over private ones (a hint that the qadi here did not enforce the law faithfully). But the old custom was of sacred legitimacy in Ottoman law. Was this the source of the qadi's decision?

In Chapter 8 Christian Sassmannshausen discusses the complex issue of a conflict within a notable family of late Ottoman Tripoli over the possessions of a family member who was considered mentally challenged and incapable of taking care of his own interests. That member hence needed a guardian to look after his affairs. In the case under review, the qadi was not of the opinion that the “natural” family member in line for the job was the most appropriate, and opted to nominate someone else. Hence, a series of legal conflicts arose that lasted for years, which gave an opportunity for the writer to offer several statements on the procedure of the qadi court, and the role of the qadi in relations between the law and society. As someone with experience of the seventeenth-century sijill, I am struck by the extraordinary length of nineteenth-century legal cases, a point deserving further study.