Shari'a and governance in Ottoman Egypt: the waqf controversy in the mid-sixteenth century

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Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0020743824000278

In the mid-16th century, the Ottoman government sought to expand its tax revenue from Egypt through a controversial initiative to levy taxes on endowments (waqf). The controversy produced a diverse range of responses from Ottoman scholar-bureaucrats, such as Ebussuud Efendi, who supported the initiative; Egyptian scholars, including Ibn Nujaym and al-Ghayti, who opposed it; and the Ottoman governor, who worked to resolve it. Despite the opposing positions of the diverse actors, sharia served as the common medium for the articulation and negotiation of their opinions and helped produce a compromise that became foundational for the Ottoman tax regime in Egypt. In this episode, sharia constituted an instrument of governance. Such a role for sharia differs from its conception as an autonomous field of scholarly interpretation, or the understanding of it as an inclusive normative system encompassing rules emerging from both the interpretative activities of scholars and the definitive edicts and orders of rulers. Sharia did not constitute the endpoint of rulemaking; rather, it provided the shared language of terms and concepts through which different actors participated in the process of formulating rules.