Leslie P. Peirce
Journal of Women's History, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 197-202
(Article)
Leslie Peirce
and his legal advisers to regulate marriage by putting more control into
the hands of fathers and grandfathers—a cognate action, it would seem, to
what was happening in western Europe—were to be realized.
Perhaps, in my superficial knowledge of European legal practice, I am
setting up a contrast where nuances of difference may more appropriate,
especially in the sixteenth century that my book describes. But if the rise
of secular courts in western Europe is connected to the fact that women
appeared in courts as witnesses virtually as often as men (at least in the
courts studied by Hardwick)—with the outcome that they were “more ac-
tive architects” of values that could be legitimized by the courts than their
Ottoman sisters, who were barred for the most part from giving witness
in court—then the fact of a single system of courts with a distinct set of
procedural protocols may have worked to Ottoman women’s disadvantage.
On the other hand, except for criminal or state-administrative matters, Ot-
toman subjects had the option of seeking legal assistance and resolution of
disputes from religious authorities, be they priests, rabbis, or muftis and
imams. This “consumer option” left some legal discretion to individuals,
and also allowed some aspects of social life to escape legal scrutiny—for
instance, the autonomous world of women’s property that I described in
chapter 6 of the book.
The second issue I want to consider, raised by Chatterjee, is how my
work fits into a more global universe. To put this another way, is Chatterjee
justified in suggesting that I tend to address myself to a western audience
and put the Ottomans into dialogue with the rhythms and prevailing un-
derstandings of European history, but that my research may have more
linkages with the work of historians of Asia, especially historians of Mus-
lim polities and societies that share with the Ottomans the structures and
lived experiences of Islamic law, and that there is therefore much I could
learn from scholarship in these fields? All this is true. It is probably true
that my first book, which dealt with women and sovereignty among the
Ottomans, resonated more among historians of South Asia and China than
among historians of Europe, and this no doubt was because of the similar
intersections of rulership with the politics of gender in Asian polities, where
rulers had multiple wives as well as concubines. Even though I profited a
great deal in that book from studies of Asian polities, it is true that I was
attempting to engage a Europeanist audience, to persuade such an audi-
ence that the Ottomans should matter to them, and that this Eurasian and
Mediterranean empire cannot be relegated to an “other” history of an alien
“Middle East” (a label that is decidedly modern, western-Eurocentric, and
colonialist). I could safely assume that historians of Iran, South India, and
Inner Asia would “get” the arguments of that book, because of both the
Islamic and the Turko-Mongol political heritage shared by many of these
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courts (only, it seems, when they could get a better deal there), and why
the empire’s chief mufti could declare that the standard of conduct for elite
women—not appearing in public except with a respectable retinue—was not
a dictate of Islam, as his petitioners understood it, because it was a shared
practice among Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women.
That the Ottomans looked west more than east, both consciously and
unconsciously, is no doubt an artifact of historical gravity. But there was
also a “push” westward. The late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tensions
and then wars of religion between sunni and shi`ite kept Iran, the Otto-
mans’ most important eastern neighbor and rival, from being the source
of cultural modelling that it had been for centuries. There was among the
Ottomans more vituperation of easterners and shi`ites than of westerners
(“franks”) and Christians. Mughal India was just too far away for its fasci-
nating religious and cultural experiments to affect the Ottomans with the
alacrity that Mediterranean currents did. This of course did not undermine
either the density of trade with Muslim societies to the east or the shared
devotion to sufism, Persian poetry, and the classics of the medieval Islamic
world from connecting the Ottoman world with its eastern neighbors. Sig-
nificant numbers of traders and intellectuals were oriented eastward, but
they may also have kept an eye on developments coming from the west.
The Ottomans were indeed Janus-faced.
The question of cultural translation between Muslims and non-Mus-
lims in Muslim-ruled empires (in the Ottoman case, Christians and Jews),
also raised by Chatterjee, is obviously relevant here. This question can also
help us understand comparative commonalities with the French and Italian
cases, as well as with the South Asian. It is definitely true that the dialogue
between zimmi (“protected” religious communities under Islamic rulership)
and Muslim is understudied in the Ottoman case, where we are pretty much
aware of the “what” of cultural accommodations and tensions but much less
so of the “how.” Chatterjee is absolutely right to suggest that the presence
of zimmis throughout Muslim-dominated space and time conditioned the
consolidation of Islamic law. I would stress that the conditioning was an
on-going process. The role of kanun (as imperial law) under the Ottomans
was to keep that process moving, to mediate between the practical realities
of governing a polyglot polity and the sometimes unworkable dictates of
religious law. Cultural translation had been going on at a broader level and
for millenia before the advent of Islam, at least in the eastern Mediterranean
and Near East. The region was a veritable melting pot of cultures, among
them Greek, Persian, Armenian, Roman (itself an amalgam), then Turkish.
An example of a new ingredient in early modern times was the immigra-
tion of Iberian Jews into the Ottoman domain after 1492, a date that struck
a blow to multi-cultural Spain.
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