| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, October 1, 2015 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | External Event, Jackman Humanities Building Room 318 170 St. George Street |
Seminar in Ottoman & Turkish Studies
In Greater Syria (and beyond) from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries there was a debate concerning the evidentiary status of the Ottoman imperial registers (defters). At the center of the jurists’ debate is the permissibility of using imperial registers as independent, uncorroborated evidence. It was a debate about who had the right to regulate and determine what constituted an authentic evidential document: while some jurists argued that it was almost exclusively the privilege of the jurists, others were willing to concede this authority, at least in part, to the Ottoman dynasty and its bureaucracy. Furthermore, the debate about the evidentiary validity of the defters captures the complex relationship between Ottoman dynastic law and the Hanafi fiqh discourse. Finally, the debate sheds light on the legal “defterization” of other types of documents and texts, such as a chronicle (ta’rikh) and court records (sijill).
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