Political power and lawmaking in the Ottoman Empire: Ulamāʾ and Sultans vis-à-vis Sharia

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Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192888341.003.0006

Delineating the authority to define and implement sharia has been an essential question in the historical practice of Islamic societies. Generally speaking, during the pre-Ottoman period, ʿulamāʾ (Muslim scholars), as specialists of scriptural sources and sharia knowledge, and rulers, as the holders of political power, competed for primacy in this sphere. This chapter starts with the Ottoman institutional development in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that gradually transformed ʿulamāʾ from being independent interpreters of scriptural sources and producers of sharia to being agents of the Ottoman government, scholar-bureaucrats. It argues that this institutional development inaugurated a decisive new chapter in the configuration of political and lawmaking authority in Islamic history, one in which the executive authority and ʿulamāʾ were positioned not as rivals but instead as partners in the exercise of political power, harnessing the coercive power of the state to make binding laws from sharia knowledge.