Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

4 | Legal reform from the 1830s to the First World
War
Although this chapter will later return to a jurist of Damascus, it sketches
nineteenth-century legal change primarily from the vantage point of the imperial
capital. By the second half of the eighteenth century the distance between
provincial and imperial legal languages appeared to have narrowed and was to
shrink further after the 1830s when legal texts began to appear in printed form,
the first issue of the official gazette of the empire being published in Istanbul in
1831. 1 Ibn ‘Abidin, who died in 1836, was thus the last great figure in the Hanafi
culture of the manuscript.
Ottoman reform initiated change through imperial enunciation of law in the
form of kanuns and nizamnames; this built upon established understandings
concerning the power of the kanun to render uniform rules and practices across
the empire, the right of the sheikh-ul-Islam to determine an official interpretation
of Islamic jurisprudence, and the unity of all Ottoman law. 2 From the sixteenth
to eighteenth centuries doctrinal unification had rested on the circulation of
appointed judges and muftis and their training in a hierarchy of educational
institutions, the pinnacle of which was in Istanbul where Turkish was the primary
scholarly language. Such unification had its limits. As we saw in the last chapter,
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ulema had interpreted administrative
practice through an historical corpus of jurisprudence, and local dynasties of
muftis predominated in the provinces. By contrast, from the 1830s the Ottomans
were to adopt modern methods to reduce variation in interpretation: printed
texts and translations circulated in the official gazette and provincial newspapers;
formal codification with numbered clauses and minimal argumentation; structures
of judicial appeal; registration of persons and objects governed by law; and
unification of categories between different administrative registers. Codified law
announced what the regulations of administrative institutions would endeavour
to make real. The same reductive systematization was eventually also undertaken
for major domains of fiqh, producing the Mecelle.
Legal change may thus be described in a more linear manner for the nineteenth
than for earlier centuries. But the greater reach of the state into society was to
rest not only upon law but also upon political administration and the education
of elites.
Ottoman reform was not guided by an ideology of private property such
as marked France or Britain of the nineteenth century. Nor was Ottoman lawmaking
a mechanical importation of European law. Rather, the changes reflect
a gradual reworking of legal vocabularies; only at the very end of the century
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