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The Second Formation of Islamic Law is the first book to deal with the rise of an official school of law in the post-Mongol period. The author explores how the Ottoman dynasty shaped the structure and doctrine of a particular branch within the Hanafi school of law. In addition, the book examines the opposition of various jurists, mostly from the empire's Arab provinces, to this development. By looking at the emergence of the concept of an official school of law, the book seeks to call into question the grand narratives of Islamic legal history that tend to see the nineteenth century as the major rupture. Instead, an argument is formed that some of the supposedly nineteenth-century developments, such as the codification of Islamic law, are rooted in much earlier centuries. In so doing, the book offers a new periodization of Islamic legal history in the eastern Islamic lands

Abstract
The article examines the rise of standardized collections of fatāwā issued by officially appointed provincial Hanafi muftis across the Ottoman Empire in the long eighteenth century. The article focuses on the earliest compilation, that of the Jerusalemite Ḥanafī mufti, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Abī al-Luṭf. This compilation was commissioned by the famous chief imperial mufti Feyzullah Efendi. The article then traces the proliferation of the standardized fatāwā compilation over the course of the eighteenth century, from Medina to the Balkans. This essay seeks to examine the emergence of local/provincial compilations of fatāwā over the eighteenth century as yet another chapter in the long intervention of the Ottoman dynasty (through its learned hierarchy) in the regulation of the doctrines of the Ḥanafī madhhab at the imperial and provincial levels. Focusing on Feyzullah Efendi's initiative and its aftermath may cast light on specific venues and practices in which this intervention took place in a particular historical moment.

AbstractThe article examines multiple approaches to archived documents and documentary depositories in the Ottoman Empire. By exploring a range of views that reflect a sense of archival consciousness among different groups and individuals throughout the Ottoman lands, the essay seeks to better contextualize the Ottoman quite successful attempts to regulate the imperial paper trail and to promote a specific view of the archive. More generally, by tracing the emergence of a particular form of archival consciousness among members of the imperial administrative and judicial elites as well as Ottoman subjects, the article intends to offer a framework for a comparative study of the archival practices throughout the eastern Islamic lands.

This review essay seeks to offer an analytic/historiographical framework that would pay closer attention to the imperial legal landscape and the Hanafi jurisprudential tradition. This framework, I believe, adds to the continuum that Beshara B. Doumani proposes, which is based on the political economy of different localities across the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean and, perhaps, well beyond. Taken together, both aspects of the framework reveal the complexity of the Ottoman legal landscape. They also suggest new directions in which Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean could be generalized while retaining the rich local dimension of the work.

AbstractThis article proposes a comparative analytical framework to study changes in Islamic law during the post-Mongol period, particularly the rise of the official school of law (or statemadhhab). Taking as my case study the Ottoman adoption of a particular branch within the Sunni Hanafi school of law, I suggest that this adoption marks a new chapter in Islamic legal history. In earlier periods, while rulers appointed judges and thus regulated the adjudication procedures, they did not intervene, at least theoretically, in the structure and doctrine of the schools of law, which remained the relatively autonomous realm of the jurists. The Ottoman adoption of the school, by contrast, was not merely an act of state patronage, since the dynasty played an important role in regulating the school's structure and doctrine. To this end, it employed a set of administrative and institutional practices, such as the development of an imperial learned hierarchy with standardized career and training tracks and the appointment of jurisconsults (muftis). Some of these practices were found in other polities across the eastern Islamic lands in the post-Mongol period, but these similarities have not been treated comparatively in modern historiography. They suggest that the Ottoman case was part of a broader legal culture that spanned several polities across the region. This article outlines a framework that will enable historians of Islamic law to treat these similarities in a more coherent manner. The framework raises key issues in the historiography of Islamic law and its nineteenth-century modernization.

AbstractThis study looks at the history of two madrasas in Jerusalem, al-Madrasa al-ʿUthmaniyya and al-Madrasa al-Fanariyya from the 15th to the 18th centuries, in order to examine an understudied Ottoman institution: the imperial provincial madrasa. The imperial madrasas were assigned to the state-appointed Hanafi muftis of different localities across the empire. This essay argues that these learning institutions helped to consolidate the connection between the Ottoman dynasty, its appointed jurisconsults, and its broader imperial learned hierarchy. Beyond revealing some of its important institutional aspects, examining the imperial provincial madrasa casts light on the doctrinal role the Ottoman dynasty assumed in regulating the content of Hanafi jurisprudence that members of the imperial learned hierarchy were to apply. This role and the connections between the dynasty and its appointed jurisconsults had important effects within the diverse legal landscape of the empire, where multiple Sunni (especially Hanafi) legal and scholarly traditions coexisted. In further analyzing the identity of the endowers of these imperial madrasas, the article opens up new avenues for exploring how the Ottoman dynasty was defined in different contexts.

AbstractThis essay addresses the revival of culturalist assumptions in historical archival studies and suggests an alternative framework. Rather than provenance, it privileges textual circulation; rather than civilizational divides between supposedly distinct "European" and "Islamic" archivalities, it highlights mutability and commensurability as defining elements of a broadly shared, if inherently dynamic, internally complex, and transactionally defined early modern archivality. We first show how the historiography on early modern archives has inadvertently perpetuated a myopic Eurocentric view of the centralized archive as a key aspect of European archivality. We analyze how the construct "Islamic archivality," when proffered as a comparative counterpoint to such European archivality, not only promotes an outdated understanding of "Islam" (and, indeed "Europe") as a discrete, transhistorical phenomenon, but rests on a limited set of mostly pre-Ottoman, medieval examples. By positing "Islam" as fundamentally premodern, this historiography sidesteps significant shared late antique genealogies of textual practices and mobilities across a vast early modern region that traverses modern continental/civilizational configurations. In lieu of the prevalent comparative mode, which juxtaposes civilizational blocs and then selectively contrasts specific archival institutions and practices, we suggest concentrating on intersections and circulations of documents and practices across ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Drawing on examples from our research in Ottoman diplomatic archives, we challenge scholars of early modern archivality to move beyond fixed notions of "European," and "non-European," "centralized" and "decentralized" archives, and "original" and "copy," as primary indices of comparison, and attend to the social life of documents and their mutability through circulation.