Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Islam after Empire 4 5Europe. Ottoman responses to these challenges were varied. They includedboth a restructuring of the military and a series of legal and administrative reformsthat sought to transform a disjointed feudal social and political orderinto a centralized modern state.These reforms, called the t a n z i m a t , or “reorderings,” affected the central elementsof the Ottoman bureaucracy as well as the subsequent course of Islamiclegal and political development in Ottoman territories. In particular,these legal reforms set the stage for a comprehensive revision in traditionalmethods of legal and religious training and are in part responsible for conte m p o r a ry calls for the application of s h a r i ’ a , or Islamic law. S h a r i ’ a had traditionallyrevolved around a complex set of educational institutions in whichmen committed to memory a hierarchy of sacred texts and their commentaries,beginning with the Qur’an and the s u n n a of the Prophet, as witnessedby his contemporaries and transmitted through specific lines of intellectualdescent. A deep familiarity with these texts as well as with later works of jurisprudence,or f i q h , qualified one to render opinions, or f a t w as, on points ofcorrect practice relevant to ritual, commercial, or personal activities. The institutionalstructures through which s h a r i ’ a was applied consisted of courts,mosques, and schools manned by a corps of professional men of learning,who, as Albert Hourani has argued, acted as both administrative and morallinks between the Ottoman sultan and his subjects throughout the empire.As part of the Ottoman t a n z i m a t , committees of scholars and bureaucratswere charged with reordering the practice of s h a r i ’ a . Their goal was to forgescattered principles of legal decisionmaking—formerly embodied in the individualjurists, whose authority rested on their personal mastery of the legal tradition—intoan abstract and systematized European-style legal code. Theoretica l l y, such a code was to be applicable in a standardized way across the vastgeographical reaches of the empire, without differences of emphasis or opinionon the part of individual judges. The practice of law would thus no longerrequire the informed interpretation of a traditionally trained scholar. Instead,the flexible traditional system of adjudication and advice in which eachscholar could potentially render a different decision based on distinct traditionsof textual interpretation—and in which a questioner could potentially ignoreone scholar’s interpretation in favor of another, equally authoritativeone—would be forced into a new institutional framework, to become themonovocal voice of a centralizing state.It is ironic that today, the call by contemporary Islamic activists to rid theircountries of Western influence by applying s h a r i ’ a , or Islamic law, comes at thev e ry time that “Islamic law” is increasingly conceptualized as a list of behavioralrules “composed in a manner which would be sufficiently clear so that anyonecould study it easily and act in conformity with it,” a cultural standard devisedby Western European legal theorists (Messick 1993, 55–56). Such codes take