Established in 1923, Turkey has been a republic without a dominant republican conception of liberty. A chance to install such a conception was missed in the early republican period and never recaptured. The republic was unable to get rid of vestiges of the authoritarian tradition of the past. Centuries-old authoritarian tradition persisted well into the recent and the contemporary periods. Presenting ample evidence, the article underlines the weight of history and the legacy of authoritarian mentality that promoted the use of (...) authority, not liberty, in political problem-solving. The initial failure to abandon an authoritarian problem-solving approach proved fateful for the chances of the deepening of democracy in Turkey. (shrink)

Oppression and Salvation: Annotated Legal Documents from the Ottoman Book of Complaints of 1675. By Haim Gerber. Studien zur Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur der Turkvölker, vol. 27. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2018. Pp. 188. €68.

Sharia and the Making of the Modern Egyptian: Islamic Law and Custom in the Courts of Ottoman Cairo. By Reem A. Meshal. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 290. $75.

In this article, we use a mix of computational techniques to identify textual shifts in the Ottoman şeyhülislams’ fetvas between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Our analysis, supplemented by a close reading of these texts, indicates that the fetvas underwent multiple forms of transformation, a consequence of the institutional evolution of the şeyhülislam’s fetva office that aimed to speed up and streamline the production of the fetvas: over time, the texts appropriated a more uniform character and came to contain shorter (...) responses. In the compositions of the questions, we identified many “trigger terms” that facilitated reflexive responses independent of the fetvas’ jurisprudential contexts, a tendency that became stronger after the second half of the seventeenth century. In addition, we propose in the article a methodology that measures the relative strengths of textual and conceptual links among the fetva corpora of various Ottoman şeyhülislams. This analysis informs us about possible paths of long-term evolution of this genre of jurisprudential documents. (shrink)