In the last chapter I described the range of forums and practices, formal and informal, that Cairenes could use to resolve disputes. Previously, only one of these forums—the sharīca court—has received sustained attention from scholars of Egypt or any other region of the Ottoman Empire. In this chapter I examine two of the other forums— the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn in Istanbul, headed by the Grand Vizier, and the Dīwān al-cĀlī in Cairo, presided over by the Ottoman governor—in more detail. These two institutions have significant implications for our understanding of Ottoman legal history, yet their judicial functions have never been studied in detail. Ottoman legal historiography has privileged the sharīca court as the central institution of Ottoman justice. The impression given by the historiography is of a separation of judicial from executive authority, with sharīca courts and their qāḍīs gaining a near-monopoly on dispute resolution. This impression is, in part, due to the lack of coverage of other forums and jurisdictions. Some historians have suggested that the Ottomans abolished the maḥālim and ḥisba, jurisdictions prominent in earlier Muslim polities, and assigned their functions to the sharīca court.

In the introduction, I discussed Hallaq's model of the Islamic legal system, exemplified by the Ottoman Empire but more broadly applicable throughout the premodern Muslim world. Hallaq's model rests on a binary opposition between sharīca (law, the domain of jurists and qāḍīs), and siyāsa (political power, the domain of rulers). For Hallaq, the supremacy of sharīca over siyāsa is what constituted the rule of law in pre-modern Muslim societies: this judicial supremacy was partially realized in pre-Ottoman polities, perfected by the Ottomans, and catastrophically undermined by the legal reforms of the nineteenth century.

Hallaq's model, in particular his description of the pre-Ottoman maẓālim tribunal as “extra-judicial,” rests on a number of assumptions that are not borne out by recent scholarship. First, Hallaq equates the function of the qāḍī with the jurisdiction of the sharīca court, implying that qāḍīs were not involved in the maẓālim tribunals. But scholarship based on documentary and biographical sources has shown that qāḍīs were involved in the maẓālim tribunals of several medieval societies, including cAbbāsid Iraq, Umayyad Spain, and Mamluk Egypt.