Abstract

abstract:

A principal pillar of the Ottoman juridical system, the shariʿa constituted the legal basis of an Ottoman monarch’s sovereignty, a source of legitimacy for the Ottoman dynasty, and a component of the Ottoman discourse on legitimacy. In light of these considerations, a particularly resilient brand of scholarship has praised Ottoman monarchs as promulgators and protectors of Islamic orthodoxy, depicted the Ottoman polity as an Islamic empire ruled in strict adherence to God’s law, and thus characterized the Ottoman enterprise fundamentally as an “empire of faith.” Intended as a historiographical intervention contra this strand of scholarship, the current essay aims to demonstrate that Ottoman sultans, statesmen, and scholars frequently prioritized the needs of their “state” over the principles of their “faith” by highlighting the dubious jurisprudential legitimacy of three quintessentially Ottoman institutions: the practice of fratricide, the levy of Christian children, and the establishment of pious endowments with money. It argues that the prevalence of such practices definitively demonstrates that for Ottoman imperial elites, Islamic law was not an end but rather a means to an end—and that end comprised the preservation and strengthening of an increasingly centralized early modern empire.

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