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>> 83 4 Aspects of Legal Pluralism in the Ottoman Empire Karen Barkey Introduction Empires, considered as political formations that incorporate colonized peoples within multiple legal jurisdictions that draw on diverse forms of law, offer prime examples of the practice of legal pluralism. I understand the term “legal pluralism,” following John Griffiths’s definition, as referring to a situation in which “the sovereign commands different bodies of law for different groups of the population varying by ethnicity, religion, nationality, or geography, and [. . .] the parallel legal regimes are all dependent on the state legal system.”1 Empires were forced to deal with this plurality because of the manner in which they expanded, incorporating and accommodating local cultures at different times and under different circumstances in a piecemeal way. Multiple economic arrangements, fragmented monetary systems, and legal plurality were simple facts of life in many premodern empires thanks to their histories of conquest and politics of domination. This lack of unity often allowed imperial systems to function more pragmatically but also made them vulnerable to competition and conflict. Did legal pluralism, then, lead to intercommunal violence or to accommodation among groups? How did empires manage the diversity of legal systems they incorporated? On the one hand, we could hypothesize that multiple, uncoordinated, and diverse bodies of law create potential for conflict among groups and individuals and 84 > 85 the Book,” Jews and Christians, enjoyed under Islamic rule, since the Pact of Umar, attributed to the second Caliph, who ruled from 634 to 644. According to this pact, non-Muslims consented to enduring a series of discriminatory acts in return for protection and a measure of autonomy in their personal affairs. As this set of arrangements was reenacted through Islamic empires, including the Ottoman Empire, one of its most important facets became the practical legal autonomy that each non-Muslim community acquired to maintain its own religious tribunals with jurisdiction over personal law, while Islamic law remained predominant in criminal matters. It was long assumed that members of each religious community in the empire visited and used their own religious courts and that they led, in effect, parallel and unconnected lives. Studies of court records, however, have shown otherwise. They have exposed the degree to which the shari’a court was an important hub for Muslim and non-Muslim communities alike, and demonstrated that legal pluralism did not, in actual practice, reflect a simple and clean differentiation of groups along religious lines, but was in fact much more complex, multilayered, and, therefore, consequential for relations among communities within the empire.3 Ottoman legal institutions, I argue, made the most of the fact that the pact of Umar, whether intentionally or not, provided Jews and Christians with more jurisdictional venues, and therefore more legal choices. We need a better history of several aspects of legal pluralism in the Ottoman Empire that takes into account this more complex picture in order to explain why the legal politics of the empire was important. What did it entail in its daily practice and what were its implications for imperial society and interreligious, intercommunal life in the empire? We also have to interrogate the questions of empire and legal pluralism more comparatively, as they bear both on interconnected legal understandings of diversity and on wider political effects. In this paper, I explore legal pluralism as it functioned in the Ottoman Empire from its inception to the late eighteenth century, before the gradual incorporation of European law and the late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth -century transition to the Republic of Turkey and its new secular and civil law. I argue, to reiterate and extend my earlier claim, that the particular legal order of the Ottoman Empire powerfully contributed to a political culture of diversity and toleration in that it provided communities and actors with choices even though, in the end, they were choosing the hegemonic court. Accordingly, it is very plausible that legal pluralism was a tool for the management of diversity. That is, the legal pluralism that was practiced in the Ottoman imperial space, in the juxtaposition of state, religious, and community laws, produced a compromise that integrated different legal 86 > 87 alternative venues for their day-to-day dealings and conflicts, alternatives that frequently afforded a desirable escape from the grip of their own community leaders, who often responded to situations of contested hegemony by being harsh and unyielding. This same tension serves to demonstrate that non-Muslim communities simultaneously supported Ottoman state law and confronted it in order...

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