Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

century, first in Istanbul and later in Damascus, jurists came to treat the topic
under the rubric of ‘land’ (arazi).
It is striking that the imperial idioms of the kanun are fully integrated into
the writings of the ulema of Damascus only in the mid-eighteenth century.
This integration of legal discourse is matched by a remarkable archaeology of
Hanafi doctrine by ulema. The complexity of citation and the integration of
administrative with religious law in a minor work such as ‘Ubaidullah’s al-Nur
al-badi fi ahkam al-aradi or in the major works of Hamid al-‘Imadi and Ibn
‘Abidin brings with it a heightened sense of the contingency of aspects of the
legal tradition, not least those governing rights to land. Bearing this in mind,
we will be less surprised to find Ibn ‘Abidin noting in a famous essay how law
follows historical change in custom. 122 If, as Wa’il Hallaq has argued, Ibn ‘Abidin
here reflects the pace of change in the early decades of the nineteenth century,
he also expresses the culmination of a sustained historicism in late Ottoman
Hanafi legal thought. 123
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Debate in the 17th and 18th centuries