Law, Empire, and the Sultan : Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Hanafi Jurisprudence

This book proposes that late Hanafi legal scholarship in the early modern period secured a role for the Ottoman sultanic authority in the process of lawmaking. It demonstrates that Hanafi jurists sustained and expanded Ottoman sultanic authority through careful reformulations of their own school and their engagement with new notions of governance embraced by the Ottomans.

This book is the first study of late Hanafism in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It examines Ottoman imperial authority in authoritative Hanafi legal works from the Ottoman world of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries CE, casting new light on the understudied late Hanafi jurists (al-muta''akhkhirun). By taking the madhhab and its juristic discourse as the central focus and introducing "late Hanafism" as a framework of analysis, this study demonstrates that late Hanafi jurists assigned probative value and authority to the orders and edicts of the Ottoman sultan. This authority is reflected in the sultan''s ability to settle juristic disputes, to order specific opinions to be adopted in legal opinions (fatawa), and to establish his orders as authoritative and final reference points. The incorporation of sultanic orders into authoritative Hanafi legal commentaries, treatises, and fatwa collections was made possible by a shift in Hanafi legal commitments that embraced sultanic authority as an indispensable element of the lawmaking process.