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address throughout the dissertation. However, this project focuses on which kinds of cases
individuals brought to which legal institutions and the nature of their experience in those
institutions.
The focus on institutional histories has also meant that few scholars have explored how
different legal institutions fit together in a legal system with various coexisting and overlapping
legal orders. The relative abundance of sharī‘a court records from many parts of the Ottoman
Empire has meant that sharī‘a courts have garnered the lion’s share of scholarly attention, to the
exclusion of other legal institutions such as the divan-ı hümayun (which functioned as a central
court of appeal) and, starting in the nineteenth century, the nizamiye courts (created as part of the
reforms known as the Tanzimat). 24 Those scholars who are interested in the plurality of Ottoman
law have tended to focus on the ways in which the sharī‘a was modified or supplemented by the
qānūn (or kanun, law enacted by the state) at the level of substantive law. 25 However, few
historians have examined how the multiple legal institutions existing in the Ottoman Empire
worked alongside one another and, at times, together. 26 While Ottoman subjects certainly used
sharī‘a courts extensively, they also had a number of other options for resolving their legal
disputes, such as petitioning the sultan, turning to provincial administrators for legal decisions,
24
Important exception include Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, and Omri Paz, “Crime, Criminals, and the
Ottoman State: Anatolia between the late 1830s and the late 1860s” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 2010).
25
See, e.g., Jennings, “Limitations of the Judicial Powers of the Kadi,” 164-71; Gerber, “Sharia, Kanun and Custom
in the Ottoman Law,” 137-9; idem, State, Society, and Law, Chapter 2; Colin Imber, Ebu’s-su‘ud: The Islamic Legal
Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law:
Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
74-5, 92-102. Haim Gerber even goes so far as to imply that sharī‘a courts were the exclusive arenas for dispute
resolution (in Gerber, State, Society, and Law).
26
Although Ergene discusses the need to focus on the existence of multiple paths to legal resolution, his chapter on
this subject is more of a preliminary exploration than a comprehensive account: Ergene, Local Court in the Ottoman
Empire, Chapter 9. Exceptions to this trend include Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973), Chapter 2 and James E. Baldwin, “Islamic Law in an Ottoman context: Resolving
Disputes in Late 17th/ Early 18th-Century Cairo” (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 2010).
10