page_title: Sharia
section_title: Ottoman empire
hierarchical_section_title: Sharia / Modern legal reforms / Ottoman empire
caption_attribution_description: English: Mid-Manhattan Library / Picture Collection NYPL Call Number: PC TRI-18 Caption: "The trial of the Bashi-Bazouks&#160;: the court of the first day." Printed on border: "Ikiades (Greek), Sadoullah Effendi (president of the court), Selim Effendi, Wassa Effendi Pashko Vasa (a Christian Albanian), Mr. Baring's dragoman, Mr. Walter Baring, Jovantcho (a Bulgarian), Counsel for the prisoner, Pertev Effendi, The prisoner." Written on border: "J. 6, 1877."
context_page_description: Sharia, Islamic law, or redundantly Sharia law, is a religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition. It is derived from the religious precepts of Islam, particularly the Quran and the hadith. In Arabic, the term sharīʿah refers to God's immutable divine law and is contrasted with fiqh, which refers to its human scholarly interpretations. The manner of its application in modern times has been a subject of dispute between Muslim fundamentalists and modernists.
  Traditional theory of Islamic jurisprudence recognizes four sources of Sharia: the Quran, sunnah, qiyas, and ijma. Different legal schools—of which the most prominent are Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali and Jafari—developed methodologies for deriving Sharia rulings from scriptural sources using a process known as ijtihad. Traditional jurisprudence distinguishes two principal branches of law, ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt, which together comprise a wide range of topics. Its rulings are concerned with ethical standards as much as with legal norms, assigning actions to one of five categories: mandatory, recommended, neutral, abhorred, and prohibited.
context_section_description: During the colonial era, Muslim rulers concluded that they could not resist European pressure unless they modernized their armies and built centrally administered states along the lines of Western models. In the Ottoman empire, the first such changes in the legal sphere involved placing the formerly independent waqfs under state control. This reform, passed in 1826, enriched the public treasury at the expense of the waqfs, thereby depleting the financial support for traditional Islamic legal education. Over the second half of the 19th century, a new hierarchical system of secular courts was established to supplement and eventually replace most religious courts. Students hoping to pursue legal careers in the new court system increasingly preferred attending secular schools over the traditional path of legal education with its dimming financial prospects. The Tanzimat reforms of the 19th century saw reorganization of both Islamic civil law and sultanic criminal law after the model of the Napoleonic Code.  In the 1870s, a codification of civil law and procedure (excepting marriage and divorce), called the Mecelle, was produced for use in both Sharia and secular courts. It adopted the Turkish language for the benefit of the new legal class who no longer possessed competence in the Arabic idiom of traditional jurisprudence. The code was based on Hanafi law, and its authors selected minority opinions over authoritative ones when they were felt to better "suit the present conditions". The Mecelle was promulgated as a qanun (sultanic code), which represented an unprecedented assertion of the state's authority over Islamic civil law, traditionally the preserve of the ulema. The 1917 Ottoman Law of Family Rights adopted an innovative approach of drawing rules from minority and majority opinions of all Sunni madhhabs with a modernizing intent. The Republic of Turkey, which emerged after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, abolished its Sharia courts and replaced Ottoman civil laws with the Swiss Civil Code, but Ottoman civil laws remained in force for several decades in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq.
caption: An Ottoman courtroom (1879 drawing)
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