Governance and social control in The Ottoman Empire: Nezr

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2486533_(Table of contents)

The aim of this thesis is to generate a comprehensive map of the nezir (vow) which had been used a penal mechanism since the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire. Considering early practices of the nezir, this customary tool was taken from pre-Islamic Arabs and incorporated into Islamic culture. The nezir was considered a religious practice in Islamic tradition and developed by various sources of Islamic law. This was mainly a folkloric practice and could be seen in many cultures. However, the Ottoman Empire witnessed gradual change of the nezir, and its renewed form came into sight in the fatwas and the Ottoman courts. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire used this gradual change and transformed the nezir into a penal mechanism that had a collective binding in particular. Through the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the central government mainly used the nezir for provincial communities, but this practice also became a power in the hands of the provincial power-holders and their communities. Within the interests of the state and the province, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have a crucial role to explain role of the nezir in the shifting balances between the central government and provincial communities and their leaders. This question also intends to shed light on the changing state ideology of the Empire from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries