THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES the relationship between different district-level decision-making bodies in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman context. Using Sharia court records and property registers produced in the rural Syrian district of Salt as well as investigations from the district that reached Istanbul, I explore the roles and personnel of various courts and bureaucratic offices involved in allocating rights to landed property and settling disputes over land. With this examination, I aim to add nuance to characterizations of the late Ottoman legal system as pluralistic. These descriptions have emphasized Ottoman litigants’ abilities to choose between multiple state-sanctioned legal forums with overlapping duties, especially Sharia and Nizamiye courts, to obtain the most beneficial ruling.1 I argue that in the realm of property law, litigants had different goals when approaching the various courts and bureaucratic agencies governing land relations in Salt and their cases had different possible outcomes. Investigating the discrete roles of these government agencies and courts in different areas of late Ottoman law and governance is crucial for a deeper understanding of litigants’ experience of the late Ottoman legal environment.
Historians have mainly borrowed the concept of legal pluralism, in what Sally Merry termed the “social science” sense, from anthropologists.2 When early twentieth-century anthropologists encountered people in colonized societies utilizing the legal systems of the colonial state alongside “indigenous” legal systems, which anthropologists of that era generally interpreted as pure and autonomous, they labeled such situations legally pluralistic. Later in the twentieth century, the concept came to include non-colonized locales, with the definition of “legal system” encompassing non-state normative orders, both institutionalized orders like university codes and informal orders like family rules.3
In the context of Ottoman studies, historians have used the concept of legal pluralism to re-conceptualize the relationship between Sharia courts, the main state-sanctioned judicial forum available to provincial Ottomans before the late nineteenth century, and the Nizamiye courts established throughout the empire in the 1870s and 1880s. While earlier scholars had argued that Nizamiye courts’ gradual usurpation of Sharia court duties in the late nineteenth century marked a process of secularization,4 more recently scholars have asserted that the Sharia and Nizamiye courts were actually part of a single legal system and played complementary rather than antagonistic “religious” vs. “secular” roles. Avi Rubin, for example, has asserted that while the Nizamiye courts did take over some of the functions that had previously been under the Sharia court’s purview, central jurists saw Sharia courts and Sharia-based legal doctrine as central aspects of Ottoman sovereignty and had no intention of sidelining them.5
Rubin and others have also noted that many Ottoman litigants continued to use Sharia courts extensively, and in multiple areas of law, even after the establishment of Nizamiye courts at the various levels of provincial administration. He argued that although central jurists issued numerous directives in the late nineteenth century refining the details of the separate spheres of authority of the Sharia and Nizamiye courts, numerous “grey areas” remained that afforded litigants multiple opportunities to choose their preferred legal forum.6 Iris Agmon, investigating the legal environment of late nineteenth-century Jaffa and Haifa after the establishment of Nizamiye courts, argued that the Sharia court maintained an “open door attitude” especially at the lower levels of government, allowing litigants to take their legal business where they pleased. The establishment of Nizamiye courts, therefore, provided further options in terms of where to take legal business, i.e., the opportunity to forum shop.7
This focus on the litigant experience and forum shopping led Ido Shahar to argue for a new concept of state-sanctioned legal pluralism. Rather than focusing on the prevalence of non-state normative orders to gauge the pluralistic nature of a legal environment, he proposed that legal systems could be described as pluralistic depending on the level of choice they afford their litigants regarding where to take their business.8 In his extensive review of the Nizamiye court system, Avi Rubin used this concept of state-sanctioned legal pluralism to discuss examples of forum shopping between Sharia courts, Nizamiye courts and administrative councils.9 Legal pluralism in the late Ottoman case, therefore, has come to signify forum shopping among state-sanctioned legal venues, rather than the contested relationship between the state-sanctioned legal system and other types of non-state normative orders.
My investigation of the legal system governing property relations in Salt yields three main observations pertinent to the discussion of legal pluralism, and specifically the litigant experience of forum shopping, among Ottoman historians. First, forum shopping in the late Ottoman context had different parameters and possibilities depending on the area of law. Scholars have noted that the Nizamiye courts assumed authority for criminal cases in the late nineteenth century, but this seems to be true for certain areas of civil law as well. In the realm of property law, and especially with regard to transactions and disputes involving agricultural land, legally sanctioned forum shopping was very limited in Salt.
Second, while Sharia court judges rejected cases dealing directly with rights to agricultural land, they did rule on civil cases that involved land indirectly. Litigants often used the Sharia court to make claims on debt with unregistered agricultural land as collateral, and the Sharia court would issue rulings ordering the borrower to pay the creditor back without mentioning the mortgage. This meant that the Sharia court provided a forum for litigants to obtain a ruling that recorded the existence of such mortgages, which were otherwise illegal because the land was unregistered. In this way, the Sharia court supported, and preserved for historians, the existence of an extra-state land market in which transactions were conducted outside the purview of the district land administration. Legal pluralism in Salt, at least in the realm of property law, therefore, resembled anthropologists’ descriptions of extra-state normative orders that challenged the hegemony of the state-sanctioned legal system. However, litigants’ use of the Sharia court, itself a state-sanctioned legal forum, to obtain record of these mortgages illustrates the way such extra-state normative orders were themselves intertwined with the vocabulary and legitimation mechanisms of the state system.10
Finally, the roles of the Sharia and Nizamiye courts in regulating control over land must be understood alongside not only the activities of bureaucratic offices, but also district and provincial administrative councils. In Salt, these councils had a more prominent role in settling large-scale disputes over agricultural land than the courts. The administrative council’s ongoing role in settling property disputes points to struggles within the bureaucracy over which agencies and bodies would have the power to allocate rights to increasingly valuable land. Litigants were able to take advantage of these struggles by petitioning the agencies they thought might support their specific rights to land, but their attempts were not state-sanctioned forum shopping. Further, these attempts occurred in the context of an expanding bureaucracy with new opportunities for notables in towns and cities as well as rural community leaders to participate in administering and deciding disputes over rights to land.11 This bureaucratic expansion meant that litigants interacted with Ottoman governing agencies more intensively, especially in rural areas. The knowledge and connections forged through this expansion were crucial to litigants’ attempts to defend their land rights by manipulating the complex and rapidly changing system.
The district of Salt is an appropriate choice for analyzing how late Hamidian bureaucratic agencies and courts worked together, or sometimes at odds, to regulate land control for two main reasons. The first has to do with the accessibility of sources. The region of the Ottoman Empire that became Jordan in the twentieth century is one of the few with surviving land registers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that recorded ownership and transactions of land in the terms of the 1858 Land Code and are accessible to scholars.12 Second, the Salt region was composed largely of state-owned agricultural (miri) land that fell under the Land Code’s provisions in the late nineteenth century.
Thanks to a few important studies, we also have a fairly extensive idea of the region’s social history in the late Ottoman period, the various social groups with interests in the district’s land and the stakes of that interest. Raouf Abujaber chronicled not only the region’s environmental features and dominant agricultural practices, but also stories of specific agriculturalists, including newcomers from Palestine, immigrant refugees and nomadic leaders heading plantation farms in the late nineteenth century.13 Eugene Rogan’s work illuminated not only the contours of Ottoman governance in Salt, but also extensive details of the district’s population and property and credit relations.14 In the realm of Salt’s history, this article builds on Rogan’s work on the implementation of the Land Code in particular to detail the relationship between different Ottoman legal and administrative institutions governing property relations and the way local litigants used the district’s legal system. However, it also seeks to use Salt as a case study to bring out broader themes in the Hamidian legal environment especially as it pertained to agricultural land.15
In the organizational structure of the late Tanzimat period, the southeastern region of the province of Syria surrounding the town of Salt became a district along the detailed lines of the 1864 Provincial Administration Regulation in the late 1860s.16 Previously, Salt had been governed indirectly, mainly through agreements with leaders of various pastoral nomadic groups who were involved in provisioning and protecting the Damascus Hajj route, which ran through the district.17 When the Syrian provincial government created a district around Salt in 1867 and 1869 along the lines of the Provincial Administration Regulations, it was attached to the county (liva/sancak) of Balqa, which straddled the Jordan River and had its center in Nablus.18
While reliable population statistics for the later nineteenth century have not been uncovered,19 the local population included cultivators and merchants settled in the town of Salt itself and the villages in its environs as well as groups that the Ottoman government referred to as nomadic.20 Because of its high level of mobility, the population of the Salt district had been in some state of flux throughout the Ottoman period. Starting in the 1860s, groups of agricultural investors, merchants, and their families and employees came to the district looking for fertile land and business opportunities mainly from urban centers in Palestine to the west and the Damascus region to the north. Because of their relative wealth, shared language, and commercial ties with Salt’s existing inhabitants, as well as their previous experience with direct Ottoman rule in more urban settings, the members of this group would become the main local representatives of Ottoman governance in the elaborating administrative system in Salt beginning in the 1870s.21 In the 1880s, the central and Syrian governments also began resettling refugees of the Ottoman-Russian wars, especially Circassians, around Salt. Salt was chosen as a settlement site in part because of the perception that the district enjoyed a wealth of highly fertile and unused, or “empty,” land.22
In the late nineteenth century, this perception translated into the legal categorization of large swaths of the district’s land as mahlul, or unused or deserted state land. In the developing exclusive ownership-based terms of the 1858 Land Code, the provincial land administration had the legal authority to sell this land to interested private bidders or to allocate it for public purposes.23 These purposes included settling the aforementioned refugees with the expectation that they would cultivate the purportedly unused land and pay taxes, as well as allocating land for various development projects, the most important in the Salt region being the building of the Hijaz Railway along the pilgrimage route.24
The problem in Salt that would quickly become apparent was that even if parts of the district were not continuously cultivated, which in Ottoman legal terms meant they could be claimed as mahlul by the land administration, they were hardly unused or “empty.”25 Groups living both inside and outside of the town’s boundaries laid claim to these lands mainly for purposes of grazing their herds, but also increasingly for agriculture.26 When refugees settled in the Salt region with state sanction and claimed the agricultural land the government allocated to them, conflict ensued that often became violent. At the same time, prominent merchants in Salt attempted to secure control over agricultural products and sometimes over agricultural land itself, elaborating a network of mortgage-based debt that also highlighted issues of land control.27
The stakes of legal disputes over land in Salt were therefore very high, just as they were all over the Empire in the late nineteenth century. As the Ottoman administrative and judicial apparatus in the district expanded and became more complex, its main preoccupation soon became addressing the various claims over land whose control and ownership was thrown into question by the terms of the 1858 Land Code. Tracing the development of the government agencies involved with granting exclusive legal control over state land is possible through a reading of the provincial yearbooks of Syria (Suriye salnameleri), in which Salt appears as a district in most volumes. Litigants faced these agencies and courts and their complex division of labor as they attempted to maintain control over as much land as possible, and pay the lowest possible taxes, at the turn of the century. At the same time, some litigants became members of these courts and councils and worked closely with bureaucratic agencies to allocate rights to land themselves.
As multiple scholars have noted, the Provincial Administration Regulations envisioned governance by council. In Salt, the first governing council, which combined administrative and judicial functions (meclis-i idare ve dawa), appears in the provincial yearbook of 1870.28 This district-level council was the successor of an institution established in the 1840s in the empire’s provincial cities: the “great council,” whose wide-ranging administrative and judicial responsibilities were outlined in an 1849 directive. In that directive, the council was envisioned as being intimately involved in the slow and uneven process of transferring the rights of tax farmers over agricultural lands in the empire to the central bureaucracy and its agents in the provinces.29 Significantly, the council was also to issue decisions regarding the legal status of land, especially with regard to which lands were to be considered unused (mahlul) or legally available for repurposing by the state.30
In the 1860s and in subsequent legislation, as the system of separate judicial and administrative arms of government was more fully elaborated, many duties of the great council deemed “judicial,” especially in the criminal realm but also in terms of property disputes, were placed under the authority of the Nizamiye court system. At the same time, many of its “administrative” duties were taken over by various bureaucratic agencies like the imperial land administration (Defter-i Hakkani). By 1876, the combined administrative/judicial council in Salt had split into two separate entities, an administrative council chaired by the district governor, and a judicial council chaired by the same deputy judge (naib) who also chaired the Sharia court.31 This judicial council was the precursor to the Nizamiye court of first instance, which had authority over land disputes at the district level. Like most other district Nizamiye courts, the minutes for the Salt Court of First Instance have not survived. However, the surviving Sharia court records indicate that the court of first instance was the main forum for deciding small-scale land disputes between individuals and families in the late nineteenth century.
However, Sharia courts also had historical involvement in allocating control to agricultural land. Litigants in other districts had long taken disputes over privately owned property, such as houses, shops and urban plots, to local Sharia courts. There is also evidence that in the mid-nineteenth century wealthy individuals, mainly tax farmers, began illegally transacting in usufruct rights over miri land in Sharia courts in the same way that they previously had for mülk property.32 The situation in Salt was different because the first district Sharia court, at least for which records survive, was established in 1869, the year before the establishment of the first administrative and judicial council. The records of this court include three volumes of property transactions from the 1880s, before the establishment of a regular property administration in Salt, including sales and mortgages of agricultural (miri) land.
The earliest records of a property administration in Salt along the lines of the 1858 Land Code and 1859 Tapu Regulation are five volumes of initial land registrations (yoklama) among two of the main parties to later conflict over land, pastoral nomads and Circassian immigrants, dating from the late 1870s and early 1880s.33 These volumes detail that the registrations were carried out in accordance with an order from the provincial governor’s office in Syria and include signatures that provide an idea of the wide range of district authorities involved: the district governor, the deputy judge who chaired both the Sharia court and the judicial council, the district mufti, the financial director (müdür mal), the survey scribe (tahrirat katibi), two or three members of the district administrative council, the property administration official (tapu katibi) and his deputy.34 After these initial registers, there is no sign of a regular property administration in Salt until the 1890s.35
Two tax volumes (defter-i tahsilat) from the 1890s followed by regular title registers (defter-i hakkani) that cover the remainder of the Ottoman period detail the process for land transactions in Salt. Beginning in January 1895, the tax registers show that individuals wishing to gain title to property would present a certificate (ilmühaber) attesting to their longstanding control over that land issued by the “headmen” (muhtars) and elders’ councils of their respective communities. In 1904, the district administrative council’s involvement in this process also began to be listed, with individuals presenting documentation from both their local muhtars and the district administrative council at each new initial registration of title to miri land.36 At the end of each month the registers again include seals representing the myriad entities required to sanction these registrations and transactions as well as the collection of taxes based on them: at least one member of the administrative council, the financial director, the property administration official, the survey scribe, the mufti and the deputy judge, who as of 1892 was described as “deputy judge and president of the Salt Sales Commission.”37
In terms of the personnel involved in these procedures, the government entities referred to as councils—first the administrative council and the judicial council/court of first instance and, after 1895, a municipal council (meclis-i belediye) and a board of education (meclis-i maarif)—included by law semi-elected members from the local population in Salt.38 These semi-elected members were by and large from the town’s small “notable” class—they were largely merchants and landowners, and by the turn of the century they exercised a firm hold on the district’s administration.39 While the governors, bureaucrats, and judges appointed from Istanbul tended to serve for short terms lasting for a maximum of three years, there were particular local notables whose service as semi-elected members of various government councils and sometimes in bureaucratic positions spanned the thirty years covered by the yearbooks for the province of Syria, and most of the local notables who served did so for more than one term.40 Of the eighty men who rotated among the administrative council, the judicial council/court of first instance, the municipal council and board of education, eighty percent served more than one term, and forty-one percent served more than three terms. Therefore, although the councils and agencies local notables served on were legally subordinate to a district governor or deputy judge who was always from outside Salt, their local knowledge as well as their multiple terms of service must have afforded them extensive influence on the councils, and therefore in local government. In fact, they effectively took on bureaucratic positions themselves, becoming the foundation of local Ottoman government in Salt.41
The Sharia court registers also show that there was overlap between the personnel of the Sharia court and the town’s numerous councils, especially the judicial council/court of first instance.42 This overlap placed the Sharia court firmly within the sphere of authority of the local notable bureaucrats and shows the complementarity of the Sharia court and judicial council/court of first instance not only in terms of legally defined authority, but in terms of everyday workings and personnel. Since these judicial venues were physically in the same building,43 it would have been easy for notable bureaucrats to move between them along with the deputy judge himself to perform the court’s everyday functions. In fact, the continued presence of certain notables in the Sharia court and the fact that they were the same men serving on Salt’s governing councils calls into question the idea that the deputy judge had any firmer hold on the workings of the Sharia court than he did on those of the Nizamiye court of first instance, where his influence was checked by the presence of elected local notable bureaucrats as well as professional personnel.44
The bureaucratic career of Musa Efendi Sha’ban, identified in Sharia court records as a Christian Ottoman from the people (ahali) of Salt, provides a window into the varied nature of merchant/landowner notable bureaucrats’ work in the Salt government. Sha’ban’s career as recorded in the provincial yearbooks spanned twenty-two years, from 1876 to 1898, and the Salt Sharia court records show that he continued to participate in the business of local government until at least 1904. Despite the institutional barriers to serving consecutive terms,45 Sha’ban served eleven straight terms on the district administrative council between 1876 and 1887 and also served on the court of first instance in 1895 and 1896.46 Sha’ban was also active in the Sharia court, providing services such as witnessing property transactions, identifying litigants, and giving witness testimony into the early twentieth century.47 His career, while unique in his intensive participation on the administrative council, gives an impression of the extensive influence Salt’s new bureaucratic class had over the business of local government.
The members of the councils did not include the people who were often the main parties to land conflicts: cultivators, nomads and immigrant refugees. However, the notable bureaucrats did not stand outside of these conflicts; their mercantile and landholding interests were closely intertwined with the patterns of production in the district and they were also sometimes in direct conflict with producers, many of whom they contracted in mortgage-based debt arrangements. Musa Efendi Sha’ban, for example, initiated a claim in the Sharia court against Sulayman bin Furayj, identified as a member of the Wiraykat ‘Adwan Bedouin group, for an unpaid debt of wheat in August 1902.48 This claim registered his involvement in Salt’s lucrative wheat market, a market controlled largely by merchants who provided cash capital to producers identified in the records as pastoral nomads and settled cultivators.49
The people in the latter two groups of producers were not wholly unrepresented in the late Ottoman government in Salt, including the procedures for gaining title to state land and the judicial processes for deciding disputes over that land. All of these processes involved, at the most immediate level, semi-elected leaders of specific administratively defined local communities as well as councils meant to represent those communities.50 In Salt, these communities included quarters of the town (mahalla), villages in the town’s environs (qarya) and nomadic groups or subsections of those groups (ashira or firqa) who were administratively attached to the Salt district and usually spent at least part of the year camping there. In order to register control over land at the property administration office, individuals presented certificates from the leaders of these administratively-defined communities (mukhtars) attesting to their longstanding and unchallenged control and cultivation of that land.51 These leaders were also mainstays at the Sharia court, providing testimony, verifying witnesses, and performing many of the same services otherwise controlled by the bureaucrat notable class discussed above. While their resources were more limited than those of the bureaucrat notable group and their participation in local government did not extend to the councils, these local leaders formed an important middling group who took on lower-level roles in the elaborating bureaucracy.
While he does not appear in the Ottoman provincial yearbooks, the career of Nahar al-Bakhit, described as a mukhtar of the Manasir section of the Abbad group of pastoral nomads in the Salt district, is noticeable in the registers of the district property administration office and in the Sharia court records. Al-Bakhit registered, along with three other members of the Manasir, the largest plot of land among the entire Abbad group in the first land registration carried out by the property administration in Salt in 1879.52 This registration implied that Bakhit was a powerful member of the group in the late 1870s.53 His personal participation in Salt’s land market would continue throughout his life, and included sales to merchants and immigrants as well as purchases of land from other members of the Manasir.54 In his capacity as mukhtar of the Manasir, Bakhit also performed numerous other duties, most notably providing witness testimony and acting as guarantor for loans Manasir individuals took from merchants and landowners. Most importantly, he certified individual Manasir members’ control over land in both the Sharia court and the district property administration office and was closely involved with tax collection.55
Alongside notable bureaucrats, the group of low-level Ottoman bureaucrats that Nahar al-Bakhit represents created new and more intensive points of contact between the Ottoman administration and rural communities. As the courts and bureaucratic agencies involved in sanctioning control over land in Salt multiplied, local litigants’ participation in government also increased, albeit at uneven levels. The complex relationship between these different entities was the background for forum shopping in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The system for allocating control and settling disputes over agricultural land at the district level in Salt reflected the expansion of the Ottoman bureaucracy. Among the agencies and courts described above that were involved with governing land relations in Salt, there were two main ways duties overlapped as the system changed, opening theoretical opportunities for forum shopping: the Sharia court and the property administration office both recorded transactions in agricultural land, and the Sharia court and the Nizamiye court of first instance both ruled on disputes involving agricultural land. Before the institution of a regular property administration registering and taxing transactions in the 1890s, records from the 1880s show that individuals took transactions of miri land and other types of property to the Salt Sharia court.56 Given the simple choice, litigants would understandably go to the Sharia court over the property administration office to carry out their transactions since no mention of taxes taken either at the time of transaction or annually was made in the Sharia court.
While the deputy judge and staff of the Sharia court may have maintained an “open door attitude” to people wishing to record property transactions in the 1880s before the establishment of a regularly working property administration in the district, these transactions do not seem to have carried any lasting legal weight with that administration from the 1890s going forward. The Salt property registers include no evidence that a Shar’i certificate (hujja) was accepted as documentary proof of control over land any more than an informal contract created between parties outside state sanctioned legal environments; rather, if an individual did not have a formal title deed for the property in question, he or she would have to start the initial registration process of obtaining certification from his or her community muhtars and the district administrative council before being able to sell the land, and, most importantly, this individual would have to pay the taxes involved with registration.57 This observation corresponds to the point that the property administration’s main goal was registering state lands to individuals in order to pursue taxation—a Shar’i certificate, in this case, did not prove to the administration that an individual had paid any taxes on the land in question, and therefore was not relevant to proving longstanding control over land.
The central and provincial governments were by no means unaware of the threat to the integrity of the developing property administration, and therefore taxation, systems posed by the practice of registering land transactions in Sharia courts, issuing warnings to deputy judges to discontinue the practice.58 In fact, the Sharia court staff in Salt seems to have stopped issuing such certificates for transfers of miri land, or indeed sales of any other property, after the property administration office began registering transactions itself in the 1890s, which makes sense considering the deputy judge’s intimate involvement with the workings of the property administration office in his capacity as “Chair of the Salt Sales Commission.”
What the existing Sharia court contracts from the 1880s point to, however, is the existence of an extra-state market in miri land that predated the implementation of the property administration in Salt,59 and the intertwining of that market’s workings with long-existing Sharia procedures for sanctioning transactions in mülk property. The continuing existence of this extra-state land market in Salt throughout the Hamidian period and beyond is evidenced by a number of Salt Sharia court claims on unpaid debt contracts with agricultural land as collateral dating from the early twentieth century. The 1858 Land Code legalized using title over miri land as collateral against debt, but the authority to sanction these transactions was firmly under the property administration. A related procedural office had the authority to force auction of mortgaged property to compensate creditors.60 However, between 1902 and 1912, eleven claims of unpaid debt with collateral of miri land were initiated in the Salt Sharia court. In these claims, the lender specifically noted that the mortgages had been contracted “outside the tapu system,” and in each case the lender obtained a Shar’i ruling warning the borrower to compensate the lender.61
While the Sharia court did accept the debt claims by warning the borrowers to compensate the lenders, it did not issue any kind of direct ruling about the mortgaged miri land in question. This was possible in the Sharia court setting because unlike in the Nizamiye courts, which looked into issues other than those directly addressed by the litigants through the office of the assistant public prosecutor,62 Shar’i procedure dictated that the deputy judge rule only on the issue specified by the plaintiff, in this case the debt, with the landed collateral being something of a procedural aside. However, while they had no weight in terms of the property administration’s mortgage procedures and its links to foreclosure enforcement agencies, these Shar’i rulings did serve as written agreements between individuals that recorded the use of unregistered miri land as collateral.
After 1891, when a regularly functioning property administration seems to have been established in Salt, the deputy judge did not directly impinge on its sphere of authority in his capacity as judge of the Sharia court. In fact, in one case in July 1902, the deputy judge specifically referred a claim regarding rent of a garden to the civil section of the Nizamiye court of first instance after finding that the garden in question was classified as miri land, denying the plaintiff’s claim and explaining to both parties that disputes involving miri land were not under the authority of the Sharia court.63 This argument was also used by attorneys in property disputes in the early twentieth century, who argued that property at issue in plaintiff claims was miri, not mülk, and therefore the claims should be referred to the civil section of the court of first instance and the property administration officer should be present for the hearing even if the case involved inheritance.64 While the 1902 case of the judge specifically ruling that a garden was miri and, therefore, not under his authority was exceptional, deputy judges in Salt consistently declined to rule on claims when one party argued that the case in question should be heard by the court of first instance, explaining that he could only issue a ruling when both parties to the case agreed to its hearing in the Sharia court.65
What then did Sharia court rulings on debt with unregistered miri land as collateral mean for the state-sanctioned property administration system? Some cases did bring up the potentially problematic aspects of the Sharia courts’ implicit sanctioning of mortgages of unregistered miri land, seemingly compromising the integrity of the system for regulating property control or rendering it pluralistic. In one case, the plaintiff lender learned after independently contracting a mortgage agreement with the defendant debtor that the land in question was already mortgaged to the Agricultural Bank in Salt in the official property register.66 In another, a plaintiff lender wished to register a debt with the Sharia court because the defendants had promised they would register landed collateral and mortgage with the tapu administration but had failed to do so. However, in both cases, the Sharia court followed its established procedures to warn the borrowers to pay the lenders back, remaining silent, at least on paper, about the land aspects. This practice indicates that at least in the realm of adjudicating and sanctioning rights over miri land, the Sharia court’s policy in Salt was decidedly “closed door,” with Sharia court personnel recognizing, and indeed actively participating in, the authority of the land administration in this realm.
The Sharia court cases involving mortgages of miri land point not to state-sanctioned legal pluralism, but to litigants’ ongoing challenge to the hegemony of the new land administration. However, these and other cases show that the Sharia court, while it stayed out of cases directly involving miri land after the 1890s, hardly retreated from the civil realm in the late nineteenth century. In fact, the majority of the claims on which the court ruled involved unpaid debts resulting from contracts between merchants and producers. Litigants, therefore, took advantage of their ability to forum shop in the realm of contracts to obtain record of otherwise illegal mortgages of unregistered miri land. While more research is needed into the laws governing litigants’ use of the Sharia court for contract-related cases and the enforcement outcomes they could expect from the court’s rulings, these cases show that litigants used their opportunity to forum shop in one area of law to problematize the property administration’s absolute authority in another.
The available records regarding registrations and disputes over land in the Salt district depict a rather smoothly running system in which the main conflict was over unpaid debts and the main players were the Sharia court and the land administration, with hints of the Nizamiye court system’s involvement. This impression, created in the absence of a minute-type archive of either district-level Nizamiye court cases or the district administrative council, is troubled by reports of investigations originating in Salt that reached Istanbul. These reports highlight two main themes: first, they show the central role not only of the Nizamiye court system but also of the administrative councils and governors at different levels of the provincial hierarchy in the process of land settlement; second, they show the essentially conflictual nature of land relations in the Salt district and highlight the challenges government agencies faced in attempting to regulate those relations.
The example presented here is one of a series of investigations of officials in Salt that reached central ministries in Istanbul, most of them relating to conflicts over land. Mehmet Ali Efendi was the district governor (kaymakam) in Salt from 1888 to 1893.67 In early 1893, one group of cultivators and two separate groups of notable bureaucrats from Salt submitted petitions to the Ministry of Justice in Istanbul complaining about the district governor. The cultivators complained that he had forced them off of lands near the village of Amman in order to settle a newly arrived group of Circassian immigrants. The notable bureaucrats, who included Musa Efendi Sha’ban introduced above, complained that the district governor had forced them off of the district administrative council even though they had received the majority vote.68
Upon request from the Ministry of Justice, the Interior Ministry called for the provincial governor’s office in Damascus to undertake an investigation. The subsequent, lengthy report effectively absolved Mehmet Ali Efendi of any wrongdoing. According to the report, between 1889 and 1891,69 Circassian refugees had been sent to the Salt district from Adana following orders from the Ministry of the Interior. The district governor allocated miri lands to the immigrants that included 12,000 dönüms70 in the vicinity of the village of Amman, where an earlier group of Circassians had settled twelve years prior. At that time, a number of Salt residents made a claim that the land in question was actually in their control. The ensuing district-level investigation found that they did indeed enjoy rights to use the land and, in light of the increasing conflicts between the immigrants and the Saltis, the lands should be returned to the Saltis.
An investigator sent by the Damascus provincial government in 1891–189271 reported that the lands in question were a seven-hour journey from the town of Salt, and that between these lands and Salt there were also lands claimed by three pastoral nomadic groups. The investigation found that there were constant violent conflicts between the Saltis and the nomads as they passed over each others’ lands on the way to the regions they respectively controlled. Upon seeing this report, the provincial administrative council, therefore, had suggested a trade, with the nomads awarded legal claim to the 12,000 dönüms near Amman, and the Salti cultivators getting a similar amount of land closer to the town of Salt. The investigation found that at the time, the Saltis had agreed to this trade, and a property official had been sent from the county center, which at that time was in Hawran, to legally complete the land allocations.
The provincial governor’s report to the Interior Ministry added that the land that had been given to the Saltis in the trade was both more convenient for the Saltis and more fertile than what the nomads had gotten, and that the current complaints were the result of incitement by a few “simpleminded” individuals and did not imply any wrongdoing on the part of the district governor, Mehmet Ali Efendi. With regard to the complaint about the membership of the district administrative council, the report simply noted that appointments to the council were not the district governor’s responsibility, but were rather under the authority of the county-level governor’s office in Hawran. Therefore, the report found no reason to pursue legal investigations into Mehmet Ali Efendi’s conduct.
While the file regarding Mehmet Ali Efendi’s case leaves a number of questions unanswered, especially regarding the rights of the Circassian immigrants who were initially allocated the disputed land, it does illuminate the players involved in the process of attempting to resolve land conflicts legally. It shows the central role of provincial officials and specifically the provincial administrative council in addressing land conflicts in Salt. Even in the absence of an elaborated property administration based in Salt itself in the early 1890s, the Ottoman government and specifically its administrative institutions were closely involved in the process of land settlement, and were quick to send officials from the county-level property administration to legally conclude the administrative council’s recommendations. While the district Sharia court may have been a forum for gaining some form of attestation to informal land agreements, it was not an alternative government-sanctioned forum for resolving land disputes with the same legal authority as the property administration.
This example also illustrates the importance of the administrative council at various levels of provincial government in resolving land disputes, even though its judicial power was legally limited.72 District administrative councils retained an important role in sanctioning property registrations and transactions, and Musa Efendi Sha’ban’s complaints are testimony to the power council members wielded in the district. These nuances are important to comprehend for a fuller understanding of litigant experience and litigant choice, as well as the late Ottoman legal system in general.
The fact that the Saltis chose to petition the Ministry of Justice rather than say, the provincial governor or the provincial administrative council he chaired, is also significant. This decision implies an attempt to bypass the local/provincial administrative apparatus of which Mehmet Ali Efendi was himself a part, as well as a perception that the judicial apparatus might provide a more favorable response to the petition. While more details of the case would be necessary to clarify this possibility, the Saltis’ petition shows extensive local knowledge of a complex government apparatus with multiplying local agencies. Attempting to manipulate that apparatus by taking advantage of possible inconsistencies between its different arms, local litigants contested the elaborating legal and administrative apparatus in its own terms.
In Hamidian Syria, allocating rights to miri land in terms of the 1858 Land Code and adjudicating land disputes were perhaps the most important issues faced by the Ottoman government. By examining this process in the district of Salt, I have outlined the roles of the multiple government institutions involved: the district property administration (tapu office), the district Sharia court, the administrative council, the Nizamiye court of first instance and the network of community leaders (mukhtars). I have found that these district courts and agencies largely upheld the division of labor that imperial regulations specified for sanctioning transactions and deciding disputes over miri land. Specifically, by the 1890s when a district land administration and Nizamiye court apparatus were fully elaborated in Salt, the Sharia court no longer accepted either land transactions or disputes directly related to control over miri land.
However, the “closed-door” nature of the state-sanctioned legal system for regulating property in Salt does not imply that litigants had no opportunities to negotiate and struggle to maintain their land rights during the Hamidian period, or that the system was in no way pluralistic. Existing Sharia court records, while they may not illustrate a state-sanctioned pluralism in the realm of property law, do show the continuing existence of an extra-state market for miri land throughout the Hamidian period that specifically contested the government’s attempt to allocate control over and tax every piece of that land. This finding implies that the Ottoman experience, at least in the realm of property law, shares some aspects with other legal situations labeled pluralistic by anthropologists. In these environments, the main pluralism occurs through practices entwined with but existing “outside,” and often compromising the hegemony of, state sanction.
Finally, district and provincial administrative councils continued to play crucial roles alongside the courts in late Hamidian Salt, especially in deciding large-scale land disputes. Their activities illuminate the contestations involved as central jurists attempted to delineate separate judicial and administrative authorities. If litigants’ attempts to take advantage of these contestations are to be interpreted as forum shopping, it was forum shopping that took advantage of the complexities and inner struggles of a rapidly changing system rather than an activity sanctioned by the ruling regime.
In this vein, provincial forum shopping occurred in a context of bureaucratic expansion in which litigants’ relationship with Ottoman governance was changing more broadly. As the Ottoman bureaucracy and judicial system expanded and more provincial actors joined the ranks of Ottoman civil officials, litigants’ day-to-day experience of Ottoman governance became more intensive. Litigants like Nahar al-Bakhit and Musa Efendi Sha’ban effectively joined the bureaucracy, gaining insider knowledge and social connections that would have been key to their ability to forum shop. However, their communities of pastoral nomads, cultivators and merchants also gained new connections and experience with the changing judicial and administrative systems through intensive processes of property registration, transaction, and taxation. These procedures were the context for litigants’ attempts to use the system to maintain their control over land at the lowest possible cost. Sometimes, this meant avoiding the property regime altogether and contracting mortgage agreements “outside the tapu system.” Understanding forum shopping within this larger context of contested bureaucratic expansion and the complex relationships between different legal and administrative agencies is crucial for a fuller examination of the late Ottoman litigant experience.
NORA BARAKAT is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Qatar University.
1.Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Chapter 2; Iris Agmon, Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 74; Ido Shahar, “Legal Pluralism and the Study of Shari’a Courts,” Islamic Law and Society 15:1 (2008): 112–41.
2.Sally Engle Merry, “Legal Pluralism,” Law & Society Review 22:5 (1988): 871.
3.Ibid., 873; Also, see John Griffiths, “What Is Legal Pluralism?” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 24 (1986): 1; For a dissenting view, see Brian Z. Tamanaha, “The Folly of the ‘Social Scientific’ Concept of Legal Pluralism,” Journal of Law and Society 20:2 (1993): 192–217.
4.For an example of these narratives, see Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1998); For a comprehensive overview of this literature, see Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, Introduction.
5.Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, 77.
6.Ibid., 63–5.
7.Agmon, Family and Court, 74.
8.Shahar, “Legal Pluralism and the Study of Shari’a Courts,” 125.
9.Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, 61–2.
10.Tamanaha, “The Folly of the ‘Social Scientific’ Concept of Legal Pluralism,” 211.
11.On the expansion of the Ottoman bureaucracy in the late nineteenth century and the related struggles especially in relation to property, see Huri İslamoğlu, “Politics of Administering Property: Law and Statistics in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” in Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West, ed. Huri İslamoğlu (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 277–79.
12.For a detailed study of such land registers for the district of Ajlun to Salt’s north, see Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007).
13.Raouf Sa’d Abujaber, Pioneers Over Jordan: The Frontiers of Settlement in Transjordan, 1850–1914 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993).
14.Eugene Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
15.In particular, I conceptualize legal and administrative reform in the Salt region in the late nineteenth century as typical of other rural regions where Ottoman rule became more intensive in the late nineteenth century rather than as the incorporation of a formerly autonomous “frontier.”
16.For more on the administrative system set out by the 1864 and 1871 Provincial Administration Regulations, see M. Safa Saraçoğlu, “Letters From Vidin: A Study of Ottoman Governmentality and Ottoman Politics of Administration, 1864–1877” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2007), 101–08; For an account of the contested process of forming the Salt district, see Rogan, Frontiers of the State, 49–51.
17.For the importance of the Hajj route to the Ottoman administration of the region before the 1860s, see Hind Abū al -Sha‘r, Tārīkh Sharqī Al-Urdun Fī Al-‘ahd Al-‘Uthmānī, 922H-1337 H/1516M-1918 M (Amman: Ministry of Culture, 2010).
18.Salname-i Vilayet-i Suriye (Damascus: Matba’a-i Vilayet-i Suriye, 1285/1868–69), 1:59.
19.For available population estimates for Salt, see Rogan, Frontiers of the State, 162–65.
20.The Ottoman bureaucracy used a number of terms to refer to people practicing pastoral nomadism in the Arab regions. The term aşiret, commonly translated as tribe, served as an administrative category for purposes of identification and taxation and was used all over the empire. In the Arab provinces, bureaucrats also sometimes used the words bedevi to refer to Bedouin or “urban” to refer to Arab nomads.
21.For a profile of this community, see Rogan, Frontiers of the State, Ch. 4; Abujaber, Pioneers Over Jordan.
22.For discussion and debate among Ottoman land officials around the classification of lands in Syria, including Salt, as mahlul and suitable for refugee settlement, see BOA.BEO 238/17824, 1 M 1311/15 July 1893; BOA.DH.MKT 217/23, 12 N 1311/13 February 1894; BOA.BEO 1023/76697, 19 Ca 1315/16 October 1897.
23.For detailed analyses of the 1858 Land Code, see Mundy and Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State; Huri İslamoğlu, “Property as a Contested Domain: A Reevaluation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858,” in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, ed. Roger Owen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
24.Rogan, Frontiers of the State, 65–6.
25.For an account of a similar problem in Northwestern Anatolia and the problematic nature of the categories of the Land Code in reference to actual rural agricultural practice, see Yücel Terzibaşoğlu, “Landlords, Nomads and Refugees: Struggles over Land and Population Movements in North-Western Anatolia, 1877–1914” (PhD diss., Birkbeck College, University of London, 2003), 64–8.
26.Beyond the practice of cultivators from the town of Salt to travel to fields in their control outside the town to farm these lands, there is evidence that groups classified as pastoral nomads were also increasingly involved in agriculture in the region during the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, see Lars Wåhlin, “How Long Has Land Been Privately Held in Northern Al-Balqa’, Jordan?,” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 76:1 (1994): 33–49.
27.Eugene Rogan, “Moneylending and Capital Flows from Nablus, Damascus and Jerusalem to Qada’ al-Salt in the Last Decades of Ottoman Rule,” in The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th Century: The Common and the Specific in the Historical Experience, ed. Thomas Philipp (Berlin: Franz Steiner, 1992), 239–60.
28.In Salname-i Vilayet-i Suriye Vol. 2 from 1286/1869–1870, this council is simply referred to as meclis; in the salname from the following year it is called “meclis-i idare ve dawa.” Salname-i Vilayet-i Suriye, 1288/1871–1872, 3:46.
29.See the 1849 Provincial Administration Regulation (Eyalet Kanunnamesi), Article 27, on the administrative council’s duties with regard to auctioning of taxation rights. Mecmua-ı Kavanin (Düstur) (Istanbul: Takvimhane-i Amire, 1851), 64. I would like to thank Safa Saraçoğlu for bringing this law to my attention and providing me with a copy.
30.Ibid., Article 46, p. 69.
31.Salname-i Vilayet-i Suriye, 1293/876–1877, 8:121.
32.Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 155–60; İslamoğlu, “Politics of Administering Property,” 312 n. 22; Terzibaşoğlu, “Landlords, Nomads and Refugees,” 73.
33.These volumes seem to have been lost or misplaced during the moving of the Salt property registers to the Amman Department of Lands and Surveys. I would like to thank Eugene Rogan for providing me with his personal copies. On the yoklama process, see Mundy and Smith, Governing Property, 70–3. For a more detailed account of these initial registers, see Eugene Rogan, “Incorporating the Periphery: The Ottoman Extension of Direct Rule over Southeastern Syria (Transjordan), 1867–1914” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1991), Ch. 7.
34.See DLS Salt Yoklama Vol. 1.
35.See Salname-i Vilayet-i Suriye Vols. 8–25, 1293–1310/1876–1893.
36.Starting with DLS Salt Defter-i Hakkani Vol. 31, Eylül 1320/September 1904 yoklama, entry 22, p. 61. This does not mean that the administrative council was not involved on a transaction by transaction basis before this date, but this is when its involvement began to be routinely recorded.
37.DLS Salt Defter-i Tahsilat Vol. 18, Kanunusani 1307/January 1892 daimi, p. 20.
38.For details of the complex election process to these councils, see Johann Büssow, Hamidian Palestine: Politics and Society in the District of Jerusalem, 1872–1908 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 72–3; Saraçoğlu, “Letters from Vidin,” 109–17.
39.Rogan, Frontiers of the State, 98.
40.Salname-i Vilayet-i Suriye Vols. 1–31, 1285–1317/1868–1900.
41.For other examples of the late Ottoman bureaucratization of local notables, see Mundy and Smith, Governing Property, 97–102. For the importance of councils in providing experience in representative government generally, see Jun Akiba, “The Local Councils as the Origin of Parliamentary Government in the Ottoman Empire,” in Development of Parliamentarism in the Modern Islamic World, ed. Tsugitaka Sato (Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2009), 176–204.
42.One example was Rihan Ağa, a resident of Salt from the Abu Halawa family in Jerusalem who was listed in the Syria salnames as the mübaşir of the court and was also a mainstay at the Sharia court, performing all sorts of witnessing functions. See SSCR Vol. 5 Record 28, 4 B 1315/29 November 1897; SSCR Vol. 3 Section 2 Record 9, 26 Ra 1306/30 November 1888; SSCR Vol. 3 Section 3 Record 19, 11 Ca 1308/23 December 1890.
43.Rogan, Frontiers of the State, 61.
44.For studies documenting the importance of the roles of notables in early modern Sharia courts, see Ronald C. Jennings, “Limitations of the Judicial Powers of the Kadi in 17th C. Ottoman Kayseri,” Studia Islamica 50 (1979): 151–84. Hülya Cankabal, Society and Politics in an Ottoman Town: Ayntab in the 17th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 123–34; Boğaç Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (Leiden: Brill, 2003), Ch. 4.
45.These had to do with the intricacies of the multi-tiered election system for the councils. For details, see Saraçoğlu, “Letters From Vidin,” Ch. 3.
46.Salname-i Vilayet-i Suriye Vols. 8–30, 1293–1316/1876–1898. Sha’ban served a final term on the district administrative council in 1898.
47.For example, see SSCR Vol. 3 Section 1 Record 10, 6 Ra 1305/22 November 1887; SSCR Vol. 7 Section 1 Record 103, 18 Ra 1320/25 June 1902; SSCR Vol. 11 Record 151, 6 C 1322/18 August 1904.
48.SSCR Vol. 9 Record 39, 19 Ca 1320/24 August 1902.
49.Rogan, “Moneylending and Capital Flows.”
50.The procedures for land transactions are laid out in the Land Title Regulation (Tapu Nizamnamesi) of 1859. For the role of the mukhtar, see Article 3. Düstur: I. Tertib, (Istanbul: Matbaa-yi Amire, 1289), 1:300.
51.For example, see Amman Department of Lands and Surveys (DLS) Salt Defter-i Tahsilat Vol. 18, p. 136, Entry 9, Ağustos 1311 yoklama (Salt Tax Register for August 1895).
52.In a 1915 census completed for the Salt district, the Manasir are listed in two separate groups, Manasir Wadi Sir and Manasir al-Arda (these refer to two different geographical areas in the Salt district). The populations of the two groups are listed as 619 and 254, respectively. See BOA.DH.EUM.4Şb.3/72, 27 Za 1333/6 October 1915. The land registration is in DLS Salt Yoklama Vol. 1, p. 18 entry 428, Teşrinisani 1295/October 1879. This entry was for 3,000 dönüms (about 680 acres).
53.For a breakdown of how many properties were registered by each group in the region, see Rogan, Frontiers of the State, 86.
54.See SSCR Vol. 2 Record 67, published in Muhammad ’Abd al-Qadir Khuraysat and Jurj Farid Tarif Dawud, Sijill Mahkama Al-Salt Al-Shar‘iyya, 1885–1888 (Amman: Ministry of Culture, 2007), 99 (4 Safar 1303/12 November 1885); DLS Salt Defter-i Hakkani Vol. 30, p. 182, entry 1, daimi, and p. 184 entry 1, yoklama, Haziran 1318/June 1902.
55.SSCR Vol. 2 Record 3, published in Ibid., 14 Dhu l-Qa’da 1302/25 August 1885. For Bakhit’s involvement in taxation, see BOA.ŞD 2304/6, p. 92.
56.SSCR Vols. 1–3 are dedicated to recording property transactions, including transfers of miri land. James Reilly also found such transfers of miri land dating from both before and after the Land Code in the Damascus Sharia court registers. He points out the important difference in language between sales of mülk property and transfers of miri land, to which the Salt registers also conform. James Reilly, “Shari’a Court Registers and Land Tenure Around Nineteenth Century Damascus,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 21:2 (1987): 158–59.
57.As found by Reilly in the context of the Damascus hinterland, the Salt Sharia court did accept tapu deed as proof of control over miri land. However, the reverse does not seem to have been true. Ibid., 168.
58.In 1878 the Damascus Sharia judge issued a letter to the deputy judges in courts all over Syria asking them to stop conducting land transactions in the Sharia courts and emphasizing the necessity of completing such procedures in the land administration offices. The text of the letter appears in Jurj Farid Tarif Dawud, Al-Salt Wa Jiwaruha (Amman: Jordan Press Association, 1994), 47. Mundy and Smith cite an epistle of a Damascene jurist from 1867, who laments the regional practice of “incompetent” judges who “draw up invalid contracts according to fiqh in ignorance of their regulation by sultanic decree.” See Governing Property, 48.
59.Rogan notes that a missionary in Karak to the south of Salt, where a regular land administration was not instituted until after the turn of the century, described land transactions carried out “in the native way,” i.e., “by a paper signed and sealed by witnesses.” Rogan, “Incorporating the Periphery,” 323 n. 41.
60.The property registers from the district of Salt include the oversight of this office at least from the 1890s. For example, see DLS Salt Defter-i Hakkani Vol. 30. For the imperial debates around legalizing the forced auction of mortgaged miri land, see Mundy and Smith, Governing Property, 46–7.
61.For example, see SSCR Vol. 9, p. 81, Record 126, 14 B 1320/17 October 1902. The phrase most often used for “outside the tapu system” is “khārij ‘an da’irat al-tābū.”
62.For more on the role of the public prosecution, see Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts.
63.SSCR Vol. 9, pp. 7 and 9, Record 12, 3 R 1320/10 July 1902.
64.SSCR Vol. 13, p. 264, 4 R 1327/26 March 1909.
65.For example, see SSCR Vol. 16, p. 21, 3 Ca 1328/13 May 1910, and SSCR Vol. 16 pp. 117–19, n.d.
66.SSCR Vol. 19, p. 89, Record 209, 27 M 1331/6 January 1913.
67.Dawud, Al-Salt Wa Jiwaruha, 108.
68.BOA.DH.MKT 25/24, Page 3, 7 Ş 1310/24 April 1893.
69.The report states that this investigation occurred “during the governorship of Asim Pasha,” who was the governor of the province of Syria between 1889 and 1891.
70.About 2,700 acres.
71.During Osman Pasha’s governorship of Syria, between 1891–1892.
72.The 1864 Provincial Administration Regulation, which amended and clarified the duties of administrative councils at the district, county and provincial levels, specifically stated that administrative councils were not to interfere in judicial (hukuki) affairs. Vilayet Nizamnamesi, Article 14, in Düstur: I. Tertib, 1:610. In this vein Saraçoğlu’s conception of a “judicio-administrative sphere” is helpful, because the line between judicial and administrative was being defined, in highly contested ways, at this time. Saraçoğlu, “Letters From Vidin,” 97.