The grammars of adjudication

The economics of judicial decision making in fin-de-siècle Ottoman Beirut and Damascus

Zouhair Ghazzal

• Publisher: Presses de l’Ifpo
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9782351592694
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Most studies on Islamic, Arab, and Ottoman societies and civilizations are trapped into the evidentiary role of the texts that researchers have at their disposal, considerably reducing the role of text and language to a mimetic description of what happened. This book argues that an understanding of social relations primarily implies taking into consideration the textual production of society in terms of the meanings that could be ascribed to the texts themselves, and, second, that the analysis of texts, whatever their societal and institutional contexts, should look at its sources as discursive practices, in order not to reduce them to their preliminary role of bearers of factual evidence. Drawing from a large variety of Ottoman "legal" texts from nineteenth-century Beirut and Damascus, this book avoids ascribing such texts to the normative values of "Islamic law," by documenting instead how various discursive practices concretely operate within a particular terrain. Different levels of practises therefore emerge, all of which documented by the social actors that made their existence possible.

Table of contents

• Introductory pages
• Table of contents
• Introduction: Adjudication and judicial decision making as discursive practices
• Chapter 1: The discursive origins of the fiqh in light of the mounting fiction of the madhhab
• Chapter 2: Repetition and the reaffirmation of the ideal: The enterprise of judging and the “idealization of the absent”
• Chapter 3: Why status matters: Contractual settlements and propertyrights in light of their transaction costs
• Chapter 4: Mourning the past:The thin line between ownership and possession
• Chapter 5: The ethnography of court documents: The transfer of property to women I
• Chapter 6: Waqfs as contractual settlements: The transfer of property to women II
• Chapter 7: Fatwas at the rescue of hard cases
• Chapter 8: The language of judges and the performance of speech acts
• Chapter 9: Judicial policy making and the politics of the regional councils
• Chapter 10: Hanafi practice and sultanic ordinances: Which normative rules did finally prevail?
• Chapter 11: The phantom of the victimand the triangle of debt
• Epilogue: Society as text: the infernal cycle of credit and debt
• Annexes