Old documents, shifting approaches: An analysis on the use of Sharia court records in modern Ottoman historiography

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to present a summary of new approaches developed by Ottoman historians concerning the Ottoman sharia court records (also known as sicils) since the 1990s. Both the well-received studies based on the sharia court records and the critical historiographical essays published on the limitations of these records demonstrate that the court records have been used up until now in the service of three main approaches. 1) The Structuralist Approach in which the vast amount of data the sicils contain is qualified in order to evaluate social and economic structures. In this phase, starting from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, the court records were primarily used to explore long-durée structural patterns in the society and economy and to write the holistic history of the various regions, provinces, and cities. 2) By the mid-1990s, however, the sicil-based historiography gradually took its “cultural turn” through considering and critically appropriating some of the questions and approaches developed within the poststructural readings. 3) By the turn of the twenty-first century, while the “cultural turn” is still in effect, some Ottoman historians started to read the court records “sociolegally.” The sociolegal readings of the court records are very much nurtured by cultural approaches and discursive analysis yet it has one marked difference: the use of quantitative analysis. In this work, these approaches are examined thoroughly by considering certain turning points and landmarks in the field and how they shaped contemporary Ottoman historiography.

Keywords

• osmanlı mahkeme kayıtları
• şer‘iyye sicilleri
• tarihyazımı
• yapısalcılık
• postmodernizm
• ottoman court records
• sharia records
• historiography
• structuralism
• postmodernism