We are accustomed to thinking about Ottoman reform of the laws governing personal status as a project undertaken under the liberal banner: such reform was progress, an attempt to lift oppression in the interests of justice and the modernization of the society. Insofar as we can speak of a dominant historical narrative in a field that has received very little scholarly attention, it is this image of liberal efforts to alleviate the oppression that women suffered as a result of the strict application of traditional Hanafi law in the Ottoman Empire that shapes our view of the reform project. Most of the established Western scholars of Islamic legal reform have concurred that society awoke to the injustice of this oppression in the course of the nineteenth century and undertook reform as part of an effort to improve the position of women. Responding to the “needs of society”, the reformers undertook to remedy some of the worst abuses. Their task was to introduce legal moralism into a system that had become hopelessly ossified and formalistic, and hence unresponsive to social imperative.

Processes of legitimation in the Ottoman Empire are usually approached from the center-from the perspective of the dynasty, the entity assumed to be seeking legitimacy. This essay approaches the question of law and legitimacy in the Ottoman polity from a provincial vantage point, the province of Aintab, which took its name from its capital city (today's Gaziantep). It also examines the question of legitimation at a particular moment, from September 1540 to September 1541, the period encompassed by the first two extant registers of the court of Aintab available to researchers. In this microstudy of the events of a single year, I treat mid-sixteenth-century Aintab as a laboratory for examining the extent to which legal discourse furthered the process of legitimation, and the ways in which the two were related at the grassroots level. I argue that law broadly construed was a field of negotiation through which the constituent elements of legitimacy were debated and defined. This negotiation was a reciprocal process in which both province and dynasty aimed to establish legitimacy in each other's eyes-that is, they aimed to establish rightful claims over the control of local society and local resources. As the principal site of this process at the grassroots level, the local court provided a venue where this contest for control was articulated in what might be called a civil discourse of legitimation.

Throughout the Ottoman Empire, land was always the major source of revenue and surplus and thus inevitably a major source of contention. Myriad property-rights disputes were recorded in the registers of the local kadı courts and archives of the various ministries in Istanbul. Conflicts over the agricultural surplus revealed in such documentation demonstrate, for instance, that peasants in the sixteenth century not only contested taxes imposed on them but also opposed the illegal transfer of land titles by the sipahis (İnalcık 1997, p. 72). By the middle of the sixteenth century, the practice of selling state-owned miri lands–which by legal definition could not be bought or sold–had become widespread, sometimes even confirmed by the rulings of the local kadı courts. The stamp of şeriyye implicit in the kadı's ruling meant in effect that the land subject to sale was taken out of the miri land regime and placed in the legal category of freehold mülk lands (İnalcık 1997, p. 112).

One of the most significant developments in literary studies over the last twenty years has been the postcolonial discourse that emerged with Edward Said's groundbreaking Orientalism, which has been enormously beneficial in heightening awareness of a set of Western assumptions that had gone virtually unquestioned for centuries.

One of Said's role models, whom he mentions in both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and discusses at greatest length in his essay “Secular Criticism,” is Erich Auerbach, the Jewish-German scholar who wrote the literary history Mimesis during his exile in Istanbul. Auerbach's own explanation of his situation in exile occurs at the very end of Mimesis: “I may also mention that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not equipped for European studies …. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library” (Auerbach 1953, p. 557).

The advent of democracy in Turkey has been far from tranquil. Since the transition to multiparty politics in 1946, democracy has been interrupted by three military interventions (in 1960, 1971, and 1980)- unless we count as the fourth intervention the more recent incident, euphemistically labeled “the 28 February Process,” in which the military played a crucial role in forcing the resignation of the governing coalition led by the Islamist-oriented Welfare Party (WP). Not only has Turkish democracy followed a cyclical pattern in which breakdowns and transitions succeeded each other, the degree or the quality of democracy that was in place never ceased to attract bitter criticism.

On 17 August 2000, the somber first anniversary of the Marmara earthquake, the mainstream Turkish media found a sole reason for celebration. Alongside lengthy reports of vigils in remembrance of the dead and protests of the state's anemic relief efforts, the media celebrated its partnership with civil society and all but declared an end to a state that was at once heavy-handed and ineffectual. Amplifying this theme, an article that compiled a list of the earthquake's “winners” and “losers” placed the media and civil society in the former category and a host of state agencies charged with disaster response in the latter one. Hürriyet, a high-circulation mainstream newspaper, described this praise as well deserved, stating that journalists had effectively “exposed all the naked truths” of the state's inability to provide for its population.