Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839

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regiments, the push to translate their military status into political power was

overwhelming. In Damascus, Egypt, Aleppo and Mosul, eighteenth-century

political elites were often drawn from the ranks of the janissary or paramilitary

leadership.

So far-reaching were the changes the Ottoman military establishment had

experienced by the late eighteenth century that one scholar has called for

a serious re-examination of the term janissary.

The inclusion of tribal foot-

soldiers, a diverse conglomerate of mercenaries and sundry other paramilitary

forces makes it difﬁcult to use ‘the military’ as a viable category of analysis.

What emerges from the few studies on the subject in the Arab world are

several trends: in cities with large infusions of military and paramilitary ele-

ments drawn from different ethnic backgrounds, local politics became increas-

ingly polarised around issues linked to the integration of these elements into

society. In Damascus the local faction (yerliyya) opposed an imperial faction,

called kapıkul. In Aleppo, the janissary factions were able to draw support from

Kurdish and other paramilitary elements relatively new to the city. In Bagh-

dad, where the janissary regiments were continuously challenged by newly

recruited and ill-trained paramilitary Kurdish and Arab tribal elements, the

janissaries were also competing with the new leadership of Mamluk military

households that drew on their own recruits and slaves.

The ilmiye and local ulema

Shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the great suﬁ Sha‘rani

expressed his opposition to the new Ottoman order by writing:

The spirit of the Revelation consists of the world order. If religious laws

disappear, the secular rule replaces them in each generation in which they

arelacking.Thisiswhatismeantbythetermkanun in the Ottoman state.

Its application is lawful in countries that have no religious laws. As for Egypt,

41 For Damascus, see Rafeq, ‘Local Forces’, and Schilcher, Families in Politics. For Egypt,

see Hathaway, The Politics of Households; Hathaway, ‘Egypt in the Seventeenth Century’;

Andr

e Raymond, Le Caire des janissaires: l’apog

ee de la ville ottomane sous ‘Abd al-Rahman

Katkhud

a (Paris, 1995). For Aleppo, see Bodman, Political Factions,pp.55–110. For Mosul,

see Khoury, State and Provincial Society,pp.120–49.

42 Virginia Aksan, ‘Whatever happened to the Janissaries? Mobilization for the 1768–1774

Russo-Ottoman War’, WarinHistory5, 1 (1998), 23–36.

43 For Damascus and Aleppo, see Rafeq, ‘Local Forces’; Bodman, Political Factions.For

Baghdad, see Dina Rizk Khoury, ‘Identities in Flux: Tribe, Faction, and Neighborhood

in Baghdad, 1760sto1810s’, unpublished paper presented at the Middle East Studies

Association, Washington, DC, December 1998.

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Baghdad, North Africa, and the other lands of Islam, the application of the

kanun is unlawful.

Almost three centuries later, ‘Ali al-‘Umari, a Mosul scholar, expressed his

disillusionment with the Ottoman government’s attempts at reforming the

ﬁscal and military system by attacking Ottoman secular law (kanun). The root

of the sultan’s troubles, according to al-‘Umari, lay in his state’s inability to

enforce Islamic legal punishment (hudud). However, unlike the Egyptian suﬁ,

al-‘Umari did not question the legal ediﬁce of Ottoman rule in the Muslim

Middle East. He merely proposed reforming it in an attempt to withstand the

threatsof both European expansionand the legal and administrative reordering

that had just begun in the Ottoman Empire.

Chosen perhaps arbitrarily, these views by two provincial scholars who

lived in different societies and times frame the changing relationship between

the central government and the local religious-cum-scholarly community in

the major administrative centres in the predominantly Muslim parts of the

empire during the ﬁrst three centuries of Ottoman rule. While local religious

scholars contested the new administrative regulations of the state in discur-

sive tracts, they had, by the end of the eighteenth century, become adept at

working within the framework of Ottoman administrative structures. How

and why this happened is one of the least studied aspects of provincial soci-

ety. Despite an abundance of biographical dictionaries and local histories,

there is very little attempt to study the role of the judicial establishment

and its relation to the ulema living in major administrative centres in the

empire.

Galal El-Nahal and Abdul Karim Rafeq are among the few historians who

have addressed the transformation in the local judicial establishment during

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to El-Nahal, the judiciary

in Ottoman Egypt was organised hierarchically and was free from the interfer-

ence of other branches of the provincial administration, reporting directly to

Istanbul. More importantly, and in contradistinction to its earlier role under the

Mamluks, it administered both religious and secular law (kanun).

The chief

judge of Egypt was almost always drawn from other provinces of the empire

and appointed by Istanbul, as were the judges of all major cities. However,

by the end of the seventeenth century, the provincial and lower-level judicial

establishment (particularly ofﬁces of deputy judges) became the monopoly

44 Michael Winter, Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt (New Brunswick, 1982),

pp. 244–5.

45 El-Nahal, Judicial Administration,pp.9–11.

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of certain families, often of local origin. Rafeq’s work on Damascus does not

delve into the administrative structures of the judicial establishment with the

same detail as that of El-Nahal. However, he does seem to think that by the

seventeenth century, the process of ‘localisation’ of judicial ofﬁce observed in

Egypt also took place in Damascus.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century changes in the judicial establishment

included the gradual encroachment of the Ottoman Hanaf

ı legal school of

thought over others, especially in issues of land tenure and taxation. Rafeq

believes that, while the Shaﬁ‘i school of legal thought persisted in Damascus,

a number of ulama became Hanaﬁs in order to obtain appointments to lower

judicial ofﬁces.

In Egypt, however, the Shaﬁ‘i school of thought remained

more prominent, with a number of scholars vocally contesting the predomi-

nance of the Hanaﬁs and the encroachment of secular law (kanun) on hitherto

ill-deﬁned areas covered by shari‘a law, such as rulings on marriage dues and

the taxation of certain lands.

However, by the eighteenth century the pecu-

liar marriage between shari‘a and secular law systematised by the Ottomans

had gained wide currency among judicial administrators.

Second, the prerogatives of the judge (kadi) were expanded to include a wide

range of administrative and legal matters. In addition to working with market

inspectors to control quality of artisan production, judges were often involved

in adjudicating conﬂicts between subjects and administrators on issues of

urban security and taxation. The state even made kadis responsible for the

mobilisation of troops in times of war. Judges, along with other ofﬁcials,

were asked to determine the number of troops that should be raised from

each district, and were expected to help in the allocation of resources during

campaigns. There have been no detailed studies of the speciﬁc ways the judges

functioned in such situations, but the frequency with which the administration

in Istanbul addressed its judges in such matters points to their centrality in

mobilisation efforts.

In addition, by the eighteenth century, judges, along with local notables,

were responsible for the allocation of taxes in both urban and rural areas.

Through a system of apportionment called tevzi, judges were called upon to

divide the burden of the provincial administration’s expenditures, as well as

other taxes, among the different districts of the province under consideration.

46 Abdul Karim Rafeq, ‘The Syrian Ulama, Ottoman Law and Islamic Shari‘a’, Turcica 24

(1994), 9–32.

47 Ibid. 48 Winter, Egyptian Society,pp.111–12.

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Judicial ofﬁcers were thus increasingly involved in a wide array of administra-

tive functions beyond what might be deﬁned as strictly juridical.

Finally, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries court procedures were

regularised in a fashion not seen in any of the Arab cities in pre-Ottoman times.

This aspect of the judicial administration of the provinces has attracted most

attention,as a numberof scholars writing onsocial and legal history have mined

the Islamic court records and demonstrated the frequency and regularity with

which subjects of the sultan sought to settle their affairs at the court. Nelly

Hanna, for example, has argued that by the seventeenth century the Islamic

courts of Cairo were one of the favoured venues for merchants to transact their

business. She views this as a relatively recent development, a consequence of

the regularisation of legal practice brought about by the Ottomans.

Judith

Tucker’s work on women’s use of the courts in the seventeenth century points

to a parallel development in Palestine.

Hanna and Tucker’s works are among

the few studies on the court system in the seventeenth century. The literature

about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century legal and judicial culture is

much richer. In Aleppo, according to Marcus, the court became the venue

to air grievances against the government, and sometimes the support of the

kadi himself was enlisted to stage a rebellion against a particularly oppressive

governor.

In the more peripheral city of Nablus, Doumani has shown that

the court was often the site at which local customary law and Ottoman judicial

practice intersected, not always very harmoniously. The judge, in such cases,

mediated between the writ of a remote central government and the practice of

the city’s inhabitants.

Thus, whether dealing with commercial, personal or

administrative matters, the judge presided over a distinctly Ottoman judicial

establishment with roots in the Mamluk period, but that had been transformed

and regularised by the Ottoman central authorities.

49 On the administrative role of the judges in sixteenth-century Anatolia see Faroqhi,

‘Political activity’. For Aleppo, see Bodman, Political Factions,p.52; Abraham Marcus,

The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1989),

pp. 101–20.

50 Hanna, Big Money,pp.48–53.

51 Judith Tucker, ‘The Fullness of Affection: Mothering in the Islamic Law of Syria and

Palestine’, in Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era,

ed. Madeline Zilﬁ (Leiden, 1997), pp. 232–52.

52 Marcus, The Middle East,pp.88f.

53 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–

1900 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1995), p. 152.

54 Wael Hallaq, ‘The Qadi Diwan (Sijill) before the Ottomans’, Bulletin of the School of

Oriental and African Studies 61, 3 (1998), 415–36. Hallaq makes a strong argument against

the assumption that the shari‘a court institution was a distinctly Ottoman development.

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The ayan

Perhaps the most amorphous group among provincial power-holders, the ayan

or notables of Arab cities appear to have been, if the local chroniclers are to be

believed, the cement that held the urban order together; according to circum-

stances they legitimised or challenged the power of the state. Unfortunately,

in the chronicles and Ottoman archival sources the term ayan is used in a wide

variety of ways that belie any scholarly attempts to generalise about them.

Often it denotes the coterie of strongmen that appeared in Anatolian and Arab

cities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some of whom chal-

lenged the political control of the state. Bureaucrats used the term in a generic

fashion to describe a group of local men drawn from prominent families or

lineages, who helped in the apportionment of taxes, bought rural and urban

tax-farms, sat on local governors’ councils and mediated between state ofﬁcials

and provincial populations. Local chroniclers referred to ayan as members of

the ephemeral category of khassa, or people ‘who loose and bind’. That is to

say, they were not deﬁned by an administrative function, but rather by a ﬂuid

notion of social position and prestige. The latter could be derived from a large

number of sources: it could be attached to holy or secular lineage, or else to

wealth and patronage; or simply result from the ability, at crucial moments,

to articulate the desires of sectors of the urban population when confronted

with state representatives. This lack of consensus on the exact meaning of the

term ayan makes it difﬁcult for historians to trace the transformations of this

social group.

Perhaps the clearest discussion of the changing role of the ayan in Arab cities

is found in a seminal article written by Albert Hourani nearly forty years ago.

Hourani’s deﬁnition of these notables is derived from the Arab chroniclers

of the period.

They were the people who ‘loose and bind’, and thus were

able to retain their legitimacy as local power-brokers vis-

a-vis the state. In this

perspective the ayan’s power derived from their abilities to mediate between

the local population and the central government. On the one hand, they

positioned themselves as representatives of local aspirations and took it upon

themselves to articulate such aspirations to the representatives of the state.

55 Albert Hourani, ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables’, in Beginnings of Mod-

ernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, ed. W. R. Polk and R. L. Chambers

(Chicago,1968), pp. 41–65; Halil Inalcik, ‘Centralization and Decentralization in Ottoman

Administration’, in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, ed. Thomas Naff and

Roger Owen (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1977), pp. 27–52. For Anatolia, see Gilles

Veinstein, ‘Ayan de la r

egion d’Izmir et le commerce du Levant dans la deuxi

eme moiti

du XVIIIe si

ecle’, Etudes Balkaniques 1, 3 (1976), 71–83.

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The Ottoman centre versus provincial power-holders

Yet, according to Hourani, these notables lost their legitimacy along with

their urban constituency when they became administrators and ofﬁcials of the

Ottoman state after the modernising reforms of the nineteenth century. Thus,

while their earlier power had been based on pre-modern notions of notability,

and had been closely bound to informal and ﬂuid political networks, they

lost this ‘traditional’ basis in the 1800s when they became agents of the state,

executing its orders and deriving their standing in the urban community from

their position in the state apparatus.

Hourani’s ideas on urban notables have been challenged or reﬁned by the

work of several scholars. Thus Abraham Marcus disagrees with Hourani’s

view of the notables as mediators between the provincial state representa-

tives and the urban populace, even in the eighteenth century. In his work on

Aleppo he has found that urban notables were often oppressors of the local

population, and at times in cahoots with the local governor.

Doumani, in

his work on Nablus, has concluded that merchants and not notables were the

representatives of local interests.

In a similar vein, Thieck’s work on Aleppo

has demonstrated the ways in which these notables’ interests had become tied

to the entitlements granted by the state, thus making it difﬁcult to portray

them as independent representatives of local interests.

Others point to the

limitations in Hourani’s ‘ayan’ argument. They concede its usefulness for the

cities of the Fertile Crescent, but ﬁnd it difﬁcult to apply in Egypt and North

Africa, where a different political culture predominated.

While it is all but impossible to view the ayan as a well-deﬁned social

group possessing a clear political agenda, it is nevertheless possible to trace,

somewhat tentatively, the transformations in their role within the provincial

urban environment. Town-based ayan were not strongmen who could (and

sometimes did) challenge Ottoman control. Rather, they were involved in the

more mundane aspects of brokering power between their urban constituencies

and the state. Several factors made the eighteenth century into the heyday

of ayan ascendancy in the cities of the Fertile Crescent, as the weakness of

state controls in the wake of the seventeenth-century crisis allowed certain

local elites to accumulate wealth and purchase rural and urban tax-farms. At

the same time, the gradual erasure of barriers between the servitors of the

governor (ehl-i

orf) and the general population allowed a number of the latter

to join the administrative and judicial elites. Thus the ‘Umar

ı family of Mosul,

originally from an ulama background, acquired tax-farms and became leaders

56 Marcus, The Middle East,pp.85–6; Philip Khoury, ‘The Urban Notables Paradigm Revis-

ited’, Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Mediterran

ee, 55–6 (1990), 215–28.

57 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine,p.5. 58 Thieck, ‘D

ecentralisation ottomane’.

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in their quarters. The Tahazades of Aleppo were from a holy lineage and

had become, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the largest holders of

tax-farms in their province. The tribal leaders from the Ubaid-al-Shawi clan

in Baghdad became tax-farmers, and held an ofﬁcial position as mediators

between the governors of the province and tribal leaders in the hinterland.

The tax-farming system (particularly the lifetime tax-farm, malik

ane)was

instrumental in the ascendancy of the ayan in the eighteenth century. Equally

important was the lowering of the barriers dividing the military from the rest

of the population, which helped integrate the leaders of the local paramili-

tary establishment with the city’s elite. Prominent families were now able to

situate themselves as leaders of paramilitary regiments, and when unwilling

or unable to do so, they recruited and mobilised paramilitary forces around

their own agendas. For example, when the government called on Aleppine

elites to mobilise troops against the French in 1798, Muhammad Quds

ı Efendi,

then the head of the descendants of the Prophet (naqib al-ashraf), was able to

recruit some 5,000–6,000 followers around his household.

Other ayan found

their niche among the expanding sector of tax-farmers in rural villages who

monopolised grain and mutton delivered to the central city. In eighteenth-

century Aleppo the urban populace suffered severely from artiﬁcial scarcities,

so that rebels often demanded the punishment of the ayan for withholding

wheat and barley.

Similarly, in Baghdad grain was often used as a weapon

by the elite to subjugate the urban population. Hala Fattah believes that

famine in the city was often fabricated by the elites who held the bulk of rural

tax-farms.

Finally, the ayan’s ascendancy was sanctioned by administrative policies. The

system of taxation known as the tevzi allowed these men an inordinate amount

of power in the allocation of the tax burden on rural and urban populations.

How widely this system was practised in the empire’s Arab provinces is hard to

tell. Inalcik believes that it was instrumental in the rise of the ayan in Anatolia,

and Khoury has shown that the same applied to Mosul.

If future research

proves this practice to have been widespread in the Arab provinces, we will

have identiﬁed yet one more of the myriad factors which helped ‘localise’

Ottoman authority in the eighteenth century.

59 Bodman, Political Factions,pp.118f. The naqib would not ﬁght against the inﬁdel before

being promised the lucrative post of qadi of Cairo.

60 Marcus, The Middle East,pp.86–101.

61 Hala Fattah, ‘The Politics of Grain Trade in Iraq, c. 1840–1917’, New Perspectives on Turkey

5–6 (1991), 151–66.

62 Khoury, State and Provincial Society,pp.190–6.

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The Ottoman centre versus provincial power-holders

However, we should not view even the eighteenth-century ayan simply as

representatives of local interests, as Hourani once posited. While transforma-

tions in the provincial administrative apparatus did lead to the emergence of

indigenous power-holders, it does not automatically follow that such devel-

opments challenged Ottoman authority. The ayan of the eighteenth century

were more like a service gentry, their interests tied to a set of entitlements

and administrative functions allocated by the state. When they did stand up

to the state’s representatives, as they often did in Aleppo, Mosul and other

parts of the empire, they did so to negotiate a better position for themselves

and their constituencies. Their challenges were minor, undertaken in the spirit

of preserving an order, or of returning it to the practice of an idealised past.

Unlike the semi-autonomous warlords that Masters discusses in this volume,

they regarded themselves as subjects of the sultan.

Conclusion

Until the 1980s the historiography of the Ottoman Empire had emphasised

the often conﬂict-ridden quality of relations between the central state and the

provincial elites. Doubtless there is truth in the almost instinctive assumption

that at all times and in all places there will be conﬂicts between a given

central state and its provincial elites. However, it is important to note that

by the eighteenth century there were fundamental changes in the relationship

between the Ottoman state and its various provincial elites, and moreover

these changes varied signiﬁcantly from province to province. Some historians

have argued that wider sectors of local elites had become ‘Ottomanised’ by the

eighteenth century, positing that such ‘Ottomanisation’ acted as an antidote

to the loosening of administrative controls so prevalent in the later 1700s.

Whether such arguments will hold true for a large part of the Arab provinces

remains to be seen.

Such variations betweenprovinces precludesweeping generalisations about

the extent of decentralisation and loss of administrative control by the

eighteenth-century central state. But at present our most important result

is that in some but not all areas of the Ottoman/Arab lands, centrally adopted

63 Jane Hathaway (The Politics of Households; ‘Egypt in the Seventeenth Century’) does

not use the term ‘Ottomanisation’, but she does argue for the transfer into Egypt of a

distinctly Ottoman elite political culture and posits that it gradually pervaded the less

exalted circles of the Ottoman provincial establishment. Bruce Masters (Origins)has

discussed this group as an emergent Ottoman gentry, while Khoury (State and Provincial

Society) has described the process as ‘Ottomanisation’.

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dina rizk khoury

ﬁscal policies combined with localised socio-economic developments to allow

a wider group of local men, from a variety of backgrounds, access to state

resources and ofﬁces. To my mind, wider sectors of provincial elite soci-

ety became Ottomanised and continued to provide a stable social base for

Ottoman hegemony despite spectacular rebellions and political disruptions

caused by political power-holders.

156

Semi-autonomous provincial forces in

the Balkans and Anatolia

ﬁkret adanir

Provincial elites as mediators

In the past, history writing on the Ottoman Empire tended to view the emer-

gence of provincial forces as a challenge to central authority and therefore as a

symptom of imperial decline. Historians drew mostlyon source materials from

the central state archives, such as the ‘justice decrees’ that had been issued in

order to condemn predatory practices of rebellious administrators and bandits

(celali) during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Moreover, such research

remained more or less focused on the ‘classical’ Ottoman regime, subscrib-

ing thereby rather uncritically to what the Weberian archetypical concept of

‘sultanism’ implied – that is, a kind of patrimonialism that left little room for

negotiated solutions on the basis of popular acceptance.

Thus early on it was

rarely appreciated that a substantial group of provincial mediators between

the ruler and the ruled existed, and even when taken note of, such persons’ rep-

utation was tainted with corruption, many of them being branded as usurpers

utegallibe). But in recent decades a more subtly differentiating approach in

1 Mustafa Akda

g, Cel

ı isyanları (1550–1603) (Ankara, 1963); William J. Griswold, The

Great Anatolian Rebellion, 1 000–1020/1591–1611 (Berlin, 1983); Karen Barkey, Bandits and

Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca and London, 1994), pp. 141–

88; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Seeking Wisdom in China: An Attempt to Make Sense of the Celali

Rebellions’, in Zafar-nama: Memorial Volume to Felix Tauer, ed. Rudolf Vesely and Eduard

Gombar (Prague, 1996), pp. 101–24; Halil

Inalcık, ‘Ad

aletn

ameler’, Belgeler 2, 3–4 (1965),

49–145;Y

ucel

Ozkaya, ‘XVIII’nci y

uzyılda c¸ıkarılan adalet-n

amelere g

ore T

urkiye’nin ic¸

durumu’, Belleten 38 (1974), 445–91.

2 On Weberian sultanism and its earlier Enlightenment variant, ‘oriental despotism’, see

Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie, ed. Johannes

Winckelmann, 5th rev. edn (T

ubingen, 1972), pp. 133f.; Halil Inalcik, ‘Comments on

“Sultanism”: Max Weber’s Typiﬁcation of Ottoman Polity’, Princeton Papers in Near Eastern

Studies 1 (1992), 49–73; Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte

(Ithaca and London, 1993); Thomas Kaiser, ‘The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish

Despotism in Eighteenth-Century French Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History 72

(2000), 6–34.

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