Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

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devolution of offices, but modified by the end of the sixteenth century to allow,
in the absence of a surviving son, a daughter(s) resident in the village to pay
the entry-fee for the lot. In short, whereas the practical arrangements governing
cultivators in Ottoman administrative law (kanun) corresponded to a subject office
or status, the ideological necessity of restricting the category of office to the elite
of the Ottoman order rendered the jurisprudential definition of the cultivator’s
legal persona doctrinally problematical. It was the sheer political eminence of
Ebussuud, the sheikh-ul-Islam of sultan Süleyman ‘the lawgiver’, that closed
debate over terms legally ambivalent.
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