Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:05:53.954Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Goodbye to the Despot: Feldman on Islamic Law in the Ottoman Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Molly Greene
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Noah Feldman's 2008 book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, provides a sweeping review of the constitutional history of the Islamic polity that connects the past to developments in the Middle East today. The Ottoman Empire is vital to his argument. This essay critically evaluates Feldman's treatment of the Ottoman period, within the larger context of Islamic history, and in so doing considers the understudied constitutional history of the empire. Without denying the importance of the ulema and the shari'a, it argues that the empire was a hybrid of many different traditions and the centrality of Islamic law should not be overstated.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , Winter 2010 , pp. 219 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Agmon, Iris. 2006. Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.Google Scholar
Berkes, Niyazi. 1964. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Bulliet, Richard. 2004. The Case for Islamo‐Christian Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Crone, P. 2004. God's Rule: Government and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Fahmy, Khaled. 1999. The Police and the People in Nineteenth Century Egypt. Die Welt des Islam 39 (3): 340–77.Google Scholar
Feldman, Noah. 2008. The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gerber, Haim. 1999. Islamic Law and Culture, 1600–1840. Boston: Brill.Google Scholar
Gibb, H. A. R. 1962. Al‐Mawardi's Theory of the Caliphate. In Studies on the Civilization of Islam, ed. Shaw, Stanford. J. and Polk, William. R., 32–46. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Heyd, U. 1961. The Ottoman Ulema and Westernization in the Time of Selim III and Mahmud II. Jerusalem: Magnes Press.Google Scholar
Imber, Colin. 1997. Ebu's‐su'ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Inalcık, Halil. 1969. Suleiman the Lawgiver and Ottoman Law. Archivum Ottomanicum 1:105–38.Google Scholar
Kafadar, Cemal. 2007. Janissaries and Other Riffraff of Ottoman Istanbul. In Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz, ed. Tezcan, Baki and Barbir, Karl, 113–34. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Lambton, Ann. 1981 State and Government in Medieval Islam: An Introduction to the Study of Islamic Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, Bernard. 1968. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, Bernard. 2003. What Went Wrong: The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. New York: Harper Perennial.Google Scholar
Makdisi, Ussama. 2000. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, Identity and Violence in Nineteenth Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
McGowan, Bruce. 1994. The Elites and Their Retinues. In An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Inalcık, Halil and Quataert, Donald, 658–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Peirce, Leslie. 1993. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shaw, Stanford, and Shaw, E. K. 1977. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sivan, Emmanuel. 1985. Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Tezcan, Baki. 2001. Searching for Osman: A Reassessment of the Deposition of the Ottoman Sultan Osman II (1618–1622). PhD diss., Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University.Google Scholar
Tezcan, Baki. 2009. The Ottoman Mevâlî as “Lords of the Law.” Journal of Islamic Studies 20:1–30.Google Scholar
Tezcan, Baki. Forthcoming. The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Walsh, Robert. 1836. A Residence at Constantinople during a Period Including the Commencement, Progress, and Termination of the Greek and Turkish Revolutions, vol. 1. London: F. Westley and A.H. Davis.Google Scholar
Wheatcroft, Andrew. 1993. The Ottomans. London: Viking.Google Scholar
Ziadeh, Farhat. 1968. Lawyers, the Rule of Law and Liberalism in Modern Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Zilfi, Madeline. 1988. The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age. Minneapolis, MN: Bibliotheca Islamica.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Termiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949).Google Scholar