Continuity and Transformation in Islamic Law

Notions of racial difference played an important role in the Atlantic slave trade and have left a long legacy well after the slave trade was abolished during the nineteenth century. Yet centuries earlier, an Islamic scholar from Timbuktu had formulated an argument against the enslavement of individuals based on race or skin color. In this episode, Chris Gratien discusses the life and writings of Ahmad Baba in Timbuktu and Marrakesh as a captive scholar of Sultan Ahmad al-Mansour. 

Image source: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mali/mali-exhibit.html

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gratien, Chris. "Race, Slavery, and Islamic Law in the Early Modern Atlantic." The Journal of North African Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3 (May 2013).

Baba, Ahmad ibn Ahmad, John O. Hunwick, and Fatima Harrak. Mi`raj al-Su`ud : Ajwibat Ahmad Baba Hawla Al-Istirqaq. [al-Rabat]: al-Mamlakah al-Maghribiyah, Jami`at Muhammad al-Khamis, Ma`had al-Dirasat al-Afriqiyah bi-al-Rabat, 2000.

Hunwick, John O. "A New Source for the Biography of Ahmad Baba Al-Tinbukti (1556-1627)." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 27, no. 3 (1964).

Lovejoy, Paul. "The Context of Enslavement in West Africa." In Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives : Blacks in Colonial Latin America, edited by Jane Landers and Barry Robinson, 9-38. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Mouline, Nabil. Le Califat Imaginaire D'ahmad Al-Mansur: Pouvoir Et Diplomatie Au Maroc Au Xvie Siècle. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2009.

Zouber, Mahmoud A. Ahmad Baba De Tombouctou (1556-1627) : Sa Vie Et Son Oeuvre. Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1977.

Race, Slavery, and Islamic Law in the Early Modern Atlantic World

E118 | During the nineteenth century, the increasing professionalization of medical practice led to the emergence of new institutions and laws governing legitimate use of medical knowledge. In the Ottoman Empire, the arrival of European medical schools and establishments led to tensions regarding the sovereignty of the empire over the medical realm in its own domains. This episode with Philippe Bourmaud follows the debates and conflicts over the establishment of the French medical school of Saint-Joseph in Beirut during the late Ottoman period and their meaning for own understanding of imperialism and colonialism in the Ottoman world. - See more at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2013/08/lebanon-medicine-education.html#sthash.SlrUMloB.dpuf

Colonialism, Sovereignty, and Medicine in Ottoman Lebanon | Philippe Bourmaud

E181 | The legal and social environments surrounding slavery and manumission during the early modern period varied from place to place and profession to profession. In this episode, Nur Sobers-Khan presents her exciting research on the lives of a particular population of slaves in Ottoman Galata during the late sixteenth century, how they were classified and documented under Ottoman law, and the terms by which they were able to achieve their freedom.

Music: İnci Çayırlı - Kıskanıyorum  ; İlhan Kızılay - Örenli Gelin

Nur Sobers-Khan completed a PhD in Ottoman History in 2012 at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University Cambridge, having previous completing a BA in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Persian) at the same institution in 2006.  Her PhD dissertation, entitled, ‘Slaves without Shackles: Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers: 1560-1572,’ was a microhistorical study of the social and cultural context of slavery in the early modern Ottoman Empire, using a selection of legal and archival documents as well as manuscripts in Arabic, Ottoman and Persian. From 2012 to 2013, Dr. Sobers-Khan was the Iran Heritage curator for Persian manuscripts at the British Library, where she was engaged in creating a digital reference tool for the Persian manuscripts held in the BL.  She is currently working as a curator at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, where she is responsible for the collection of manuscripts and art of the Ottoman Empire. 

Chris Gratien is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University researching the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East.

Nir Shafir is a doctoral candidate at UCLA studying Ottoman intellectual history. 

See: Sobers-Khan, Nur. Slaves Without Shackles Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers, 1560-1572. Berlin: Klaus-Schwarz-Vlg, 2014. 

For complete bibliography and more, visit http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2014/12/slavery-istanbul-ottoman-empire.html

Slavery and Manumission in Ottoman Galata | Nur Sobers-Khan

E197 | This podcast explores murky boundaries in two senses. The first has to do with Anglo-Ottoman commerce and diplomacy in the early modern period. Like the more well-known case of the the British East India Company in South Asia, British diplomatic representation in Constantinople was also controlled by a corporate entity. Known as the Levant Company, the institution ensured that from the late 16th to the early 19th century there was little distinction between merchants and statesmen when it came to British diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire. The blurred lines gave way to what might be called a “cycle of necessity,” in which British diplomats gave gifts to secure commercial privileges for British merchants who would then fund the diplomats to provide gifts again. Yet the cycle did not always proceed smoothly, and discrepancies between translations of agreements often played a key role in hitches, in the process raising basic yet profound questions about what treaty-making meant. The second part of the podcast considers Ottoman maritime space and legal order more broadly. With respect to this theme, murkiness makes another appearance, this time as it related to the ability to possess or control the sea. What did it mean to draw a line across the waves, to differentiate between su and derya? Particularly in an age of imprecise mapmaking technologies, these efforts at delineation often were accompanied by a good deal of ambiguity, pointing to the complexity - if not always plurality - of legal cultures and claims to sovereignty that existed in the Ottoman maritime space and, indeed, that extended even ashore the Well-Protected Domains as well.

More at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2015/08/british-ottoman-diplomacy-and-making-of.html

Dr. Michael Talbot completed his PhD at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher with the Mediterranean Reconfigurations project at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Episode No. 197
Release Date: 22 August 2015
Location: Paris, France
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Bibliography courtesy of Michael Talbot
Image via http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O916899/a-british-official-probably-the-watercolour-anonymous-greek-artist/

British-Ottoman Diplomacy and the Making of Maritime Law | Michael Talbot

E199 | Within the historiography, major shifts and developments in schools of thought and legal interpretation have dominated the narrative of how Islamic law has spread and transformed across time. However, as our guest Guy Burak argues in his new monograph, The Second Formation of Islamic Law, structural changes in the relationship between state, society, and law are also an important part of this story. In this episode, Dr. Burak explains how law transformed under post-Mongol Islamicate empires such as the Ottomans through changes in the ways these states claimed legal authority.

Guy Burak is the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Librarian at NYU's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library.

For "The Second Formation of Islamic Law", see: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/middle-east-history/second-formation-islamic-law-hanafi-school-early-modern-ottoman-empire?format=HB

Release date: 4 September 2015
Location: RCAC, Istanbul
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Bibliography courtesy of Guy Burak
Music excerpts via archive.org and Free Music Archive: Murat Kenarinda (Egin Havasi) - Agyazar Efendi; Karaköy Balık Pazarı (Chris Gratien); Muzaffer Akgun - Ha Bu Diyar; Podington Bear

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Richard C. Repp, The Müfti of Istanbul: A Study in the Development of the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy (London: Ithaca Press, 1986).

Abdurrahman Atcil, “The Formation of the Ottoman Learned Class and Legal Scholarship (1300–1600)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010).

Colin Imber, Ebuʾs-Suʿud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 1997 ) ;

Rudolph Peters, “What Does It Mean to Be an Official Madhhab? Hanafism and the

Ottoman Empire,” in The Islamic School of Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress, ed. Peri Baerman , Rudolph Peters , and Frank E. Vogel (Cambridge, MA: Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2005), 147–58

Snjezana Buzov, “The Lawgiver and His Lawmakers: The Role of Legal Discourse in the Change of Ottoman Imperial Culture” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2005);

Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective ( Albany : State University of New York , 1994 ) .

Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez-Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration, and Production in Ottoman Syria (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), esp. chs. 2-3.

Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Colonialism, Sovereignty, and Medicine in Ottoman Lebanon | Philippe Bourmaud

Ottoman History Podcast