Here is a highly readable and informative account of Ottoman social and legal history. Zarinebaf's examination of the relationship between law and urban life in early modern Ottoman Istanbul draws upon a wealth of materials. The author is a natural storyteller who allows the words of judges and plaintiffs, victims and witnesses, found in petitions, complaints, and court records to speak for themselves. As a historian with a superb grasp of the physical layout and social hierarchies of the city, she provides a compelling account of the function of law in a pre-modern Middle Eastern city.
A glance at the scholarly apparatus supporting this project reveals the wide range of sources, spanning several centuries, which have been brought to this task. Unlike scholars who tend to rely on a single set of documents, particularly the Ottoman court records, Zarinebaf has found important sources in both the Ottoman court and state archives. While building on the edifice of earlier scholarship, notably Robert Mantran's classic Istanbul dans le seconde moitié du XVII Siècle (Paris, 1962), she resists the impulse to allow institutions to obscure society, conflict, and agency. Helpful comparative references put Istanbul in perspective and allow her to “de-essentialize” (my term) or “normalize” (her term) its citizens' stories.
By situating this Ottoman Gotham in the Mediterranean world of port cities and pre-modern capitals, she is able to point to parallels not only with Ottoman provincial cities, but also with London and Paris. Through comparison we can appreciate Istanbul's specificity in terms of size and religious diversity. With a population hovering around half a million during the eighteenth century, it was a victim of all the ills that beset pre-modern cities, including devastating fires, floods, earthquakes, and epidemics. Despite draconian efforts to curb migration, a steady influx of the displaced and the desperate swelled the ranks of the poorly fed, clothed, and housed who turned to crime (vice and prostitution [86–111]; petty theft [83–85]) for survival. There were additionally the “habitual” criminals who engaged in organized crime, from theft to counterfeiting, as well those who perpetrated violent crimes against persons, including sexual assault and murder.
As the imperial center, Istanbul was a theater of imperial politics: numerous uprisings of soldiers and guildsmen forced changes of regimes and overthrew sultans. However, by placing the city in the foreground of these political upheavals, the author puts a new spin on even oft-told tales, such as the janissary uprising of 1730 (54–69). The leader of the rebellion, Patrona Halil, was as much a Robin Hood as a zorba (gangster). His aim was redistribution of wealth among the lower ranks of the soldiers and poor tradesmen. From the perspective of legal history, the rebellion marked the beginning of a long century, in which Istanbul's urban administration moved from relatively successful policies of social control and direct coercion (including exemplary repression, specifically the mass executions of insurgent soldiers, overlapping orders of quasi-police forces, a network of tribunals, and neighbourhood-based surveillance by the residents) toward a more centralized apparatus of control that would feature a unified criminal code, prisons, and police force.
Istanbul's legal regime differed from its Western European counterparts in other ways. Crimes against property were, by the standards of eighteenth century London, where the hangman's noose was liberally applied to petty theft, treated leniently. Istanbul judges restricted the use of corporal punishment and imprisonment for all but the most recalcitrant criminals and heinous crimes. Typically the punishment for petty robbery ranged from fines and short terms at the oars to exile. Judges disallowed coerced testimony and confession, although the urban police forces and military routinely applied it (350–351).
Ottoman criminal law derived from multiple jurisprudential traditions (141–164) including custom, Islamic law, and imperial statute. Istanbul judges were men of great learning and experience. They were well versed in both Ottoman statute (codes formulated by sultanic regimes on administrative matters) and Hanafi jurisprudence (one of several interpretative schools of Islamic law). Although non-Muslim communities could adjudicate cases concerning personal status issues among themselves, the Ottoman Muslim court served all of the city's inhabitants: guildsmen and merchants of different faiths brought cases before the judge; Jewish and Christian women registered wills (Islamic law favored women heirs) before the courts' notaries.
Ottoman judges used their discretionary abilities and conscience to temper rulings. In one case, a group of Jews, with Muslim witnesses who corroborated their account, accused a Muslim man of the rape and beating of a Jewish girl who subsequently died from the assault. (112–113) Although the Jewish family's rights to redress under Islamic law were greatly diminished by virtue of the fact that the victim was both an unwed minor female and a non-Muslim, community outrage certainly influenced the court's opinion. The judge sentenced the rapist to an unusually stiff sentence: hard labor in the galleys.
By foregrounding social conditions, types of crime, and community responses while relegating the actual discussion of Islamic law and Ottoman statute to the final chapters, Zarinebaf has not only made a narrative choice. She has also made a clear statement about how scholars of a distant and diverse past should best research and interpret the relationship between legal theory and practice. Indeed, this well-researched study on the adaptation of Ottoman legal practices to changing social circumstances should prove to be a revelation for those who might otherwise be persauded, by such recent works as Timur Kuran's The Great Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, 2011, that Islamic legal systems were barriers to “modern” ways of life.
