2 The systematic preservation of this paper trail invites comparisons with other medieval and early modern states, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and their archival practices. For recent works on archives and record keeping in the early modern period, see, for example, “Archival knowledge cultures in Europe, 1400–1900”, special issue, Archival Science 10/3, 2010 Google Scholar; Kathryn Burns, Into the Archives: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Of special relevance for the discussion in this article is Sylvia Sellers-Garcia, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). For a discussion of pre-Ottoman archival practices in the Arab Middle East, see el-Leithy, Tamer, “Living documents, dying archives: towards a historical anthropology of medieval Arabic archives”, al-Qantara 32/2, 2011, 389–434 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Müller, Christian, “The Ḥaram al-Šarīf Collection of Arabic legal documents in Jerusalem: A Mamluk court archive?”, al-Qantara 32/2, 2011, 435–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of the Ottoman management of pre-Ottoman archival material, see Nicolas Michel's recent study “Les Circassiens avaient brûlé les registres”, in Benjamin Lellouch and Nicolas Michel (eds), Conquête ottomane de l’Égypte: Arrière-plan, impact, échos (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 225–68; and Wakako, Kumakura, “Who handed over Mamluk land registers to the Ottomans? A study of the administrators of land records in the late Mamluk period”, Mamluk Studies Review XVIII, 2014–15, 279–98Google Scholar.

3 Sources from the Ottoman lands often refer to these registers as the sultanic registers (defter-i sulṭânî, defter-i ḫâḳânî, or, in the Arabic-speaking parts of the empire, dafātir sulṭāniyya).

4 Inalcik, Halil, “Ottoman methods of conquest”, Studia Islamica 2, 1954, 103–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Heath W. Lowry, Studies in Defterology: Ottoman Society in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1992); Heywood, Colin, “‘Yazıcı defter yazmaḳ dilese …’: Notes on the Miftāḥu'l-ḥisāb-i ḳavā'id-i defter by Dervīş Bihişt Ṣaruḫanī”, Wiener Zeitschrift für dıe Kunde des Morgenlandes 82, 1992, 149–71Google Scholar; Howard, D.A., “The historical development of the Ottoman imperial registry (Defter-i hakanî): mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries”, Archivum Ottomanicum 11, 1986, 213–30Google Scholar; Singer, Amy, “Tapu Tahri Defterleri and Kadi Sicilleri: a happy marriage of sources”, Tārīḫ: A Volume of Occasional Papers in Near Eastern Studies 1, 1990, 95–125 Google Scholar; and Linda T. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire 1560–1660 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), especially chs 1–2; İklil Oya Selçuk, “State and society in the marketplace: a study of late fifteenth-century Bursa”, (Harvard University: PhD Dissertation, 2009), 40–47.

6 Most notably, Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy.

7 Hallaq, Wael B., “The ‘qāḍī's dīwān (sijill)’ before the Ottomans”, BSOAS 61/3, 1988, 415–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 On cash waqf, see Mandaville, Jon E., “Usurious piety: the cash waqf controversy in the Ottoman Empire”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 10/3, 1979, 289–308 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the debate concerning certain sufi practices, see, for example, Zeynep Yürekli, Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 17–8.

9 It is hoped that that echoes and additional traces of this debate will be found in the extensive and unexamined jurisprudential corpus from the Ottoman period.

10 For a comprehensive survey of the Hanafi tradition's approach to the written word, see Emile Tyan, Le Notariat et le régime de la preuve par écrit dans la pratique du droit musulman (Beirut: Faculté de Droit de Beyrouth, 1945); and Johansen, Baber, “Formes de langage et fonctions publiques: Stéréotypes, témoins et offices dans la preuve par l’écrit en droit musulman”, Arabica 44/3, 1997, 333–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a general survey of the adab al-qāḍī literature, see Muhammad Khalid Masud, “Adab al-qāḍī”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed.; Muhammad Khalid Masud, Rudolph Peters and David Stephan Powers, “Qāḍīs and their courts: an historical survey”, in Muhammad Khalid Masud, Rudolph Peters, and David Stephan Powers (eds), Dispensing Justice in Islam: Qāḍīs and Their Judgements (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 16–19. For the use of documents in other Sunni schools of law, Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: State Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. ch. 6.

11 Wael B. Hallaq, “The ‘qāḍī's dīwān (sijill)’”.

12 There are some exceptions: Tyan, Le Notariat et le régime de la preuve par écrit; Johansen, “Formes de langage”; and Boğaç Ergene, A., “Evidence in Ottoman courts: oral and written documentation in early-modern courts of Islamic law”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 124/3, 2004, 471–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Ismaʿil Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 52–3.

13 Johansen, “Formes de langage”, 342.

14 As will be discussed further below, throughout the Ottoman Empire multiple traditions within the Hanafi school co-existed. Not all of them were endorsed by the Ottoman dynasty and state.

15 Brinkley Messick, “Shariʿa justice: a methodical reading of doctrine”, chapter presented at the Islamic Law in Society Workshop at New York University (9–10 May 2013), 62. See also his The Calligraphic State.

16 The jurisprudential genre of the treatise or epistle is closely related to the legal opinion, the fatwa. Although the question/answer structure of the fatwa is not always a rhetorical element of the treatise, many treatise authors use it to help frame the debate.

17 The treatise was bound together with a seventeenth-century fatāwā collection of the Jerusalemite mufti ʿAbd al-Rahim b. Abi Lutf (d. 1692), possibly by the nineteenth-century bibliophile Darüssaade Ağası Mehmet Tayfur Ağa, who owned both texts. Within the bound volume, the treatise comes after the table of contents for the fatāwā collection and the page on which Mehmet Tayfur Ağa wrote the endowment deed (waqfiyya) for the entire volume. It is followed by two folios in which fatāwā issued by ʿAbd al-Rahim and several Ottoman muftis were copied, along with passages from key Hanafi jurisprudential texts, such as al-Fatawa al-Bazzaziyya by Ibn al-Bazzaz. Tayfur Ağa eventually endowed his book collection to the library of the Fatih Mosque complex in Istanbul. Tayfur Ağa's endowment deed for this book and his seal appear on the front matter of the manuscript (Fatih Library, Istanbul, MS 2382, fo. 4b). On the books Tayfur Ağa endowed, see Günay Kut and Nimet Bayraktar, Yazma Eserlerde Vakıf Mühürleri (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 1984), 19, and the reference therein.

18 Ibn ʿAbidin titled the epistle “On the use of the imperial registers” (Maṭlab fī al-ʿamal bi-l-dafātir al-sulṭāniyya). Muhammad Amin b. ʿUmar b. ʿAbidin, Hashiyat radd al-muhtar: Radd al-muhtar ʿala al-durr al-mukhtar (Cairo: al-Babi al-Halabi, 1966), 5: 425–6; 7: 89–97.

19 The treatise was copied from al-Ḥaṣkafī's autograph, Raʾaytu bi-khaṭṭ shaykhinā shaykh al-Islām ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Afandī. It was copied in Ṣafar ah 1114/July 1702 by Muhammad Saʿdi al-Sadiqi (Fatih Library, Istanbul, MS 2382, fo. 7b).

20 On the function of the gloss in Islamic legal literature, see El Shamsy, Ahmed, “The Ḥāshiya in Islamic law: a sketch of the Shāfiʿī literature”, Oriens 41, 2013, 289–315 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 On al-Haskafi, see Muhammad Khalil b. ʿAli b. Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Muradi, ʿArf al-basham fī man waliya fatwa Dimashq al-Sham (Damascus: Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya, 1979), 81–4; and Muhammad Amin b. Fadl Allah al-Muhibbi, Khulasat al-athar fī aʿyan al-qarn al-hadi ʿashar (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2006), 4, 63–5.

22 On this rhetorical convention, see Heyd, Uriel, “Some aspects of the Ottoman fetvâ”, BSOAS 32/1, 1969, 39–41 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 181–91.

23 Abu al-Fadl ʿAbd al-Rahman b. Abi Bakr b. Muhammad Jalal al-Din al-Suyuṭi, al-Ashbah wa-l-naza'ir fi qawaʿid wa-furuʿ al-Shafiʿiyya (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-ʻArabi, 1987), 511.

24 Zayn al-Din b. Ibrahim b. Nujaym, al-Ashbah wa-al-nazaʼir (Damascus: Dar al-Fikr, 1983), 257–8.

25 All these jurists are leading authorities in the Ḥanafī tradition. Some, like Qadi Khan and al-Sarakhsi, operated in Central Asia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Others, like Ibn Wahban and Ibn al-Shihna, were eminent Hanafi jurists in the Mamluk sultanate.

26 Muhammad b. ʿAli al-Haskafi, Risala fī al-ʿamal bi-l-dafatir al-sultaniyya (not the official title), fos. 3b–4a.

27 Alan Watson, Society and Legal Change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), ch. 8.

28 Perhaps the most comprehensive studies of the use of documents in Islamic law are Jeanette A. Wakin, The Function of Documents in Islamic Law: The Chapters on Sales from Ṭaḥāwī's Kitāb al-shurūṭ al-kabīr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972); and Johansen, “Formes de langage”. On the issue of evidence in Islamic law, see, for instance, the special issue of Islamic Law and Society (9/2, 2002); and Baudouin Dupret, Barbara Drieskens and Annelies Moors (eds), Narratives of Truth in Islamic Law (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008).

29 Messick, Calligraphic State, ch. 11.

30 In a sense, al-Haskafi alludes to the concept of tawātur (multiple transmissions of a piece of information that render it certain). On tawātur, see Johansen, “Formes de langage”, 339–41; and Aron Zysow, The Economy of Certainty: An Introduction to the Typology of Islamic Legal Theory (Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2013), 13–7.

31 Johansen, “Formes de langage” 342, 366–9.

32 Burak, “The Abū Ḥanīfah of his time: Islamic law, jurisprudential authority, and empire in the Ottoman domains (16^th–17^th centuries)”, PhD dissertation, New York University, 2012,  ch. 1; Baber Johansen, The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent: The Peasants’ Loss of Property Rights as Interpreted in the Ḥanafīte Legal Literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (London and New York: Croom Helm, 1988); and Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez-Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), chs 2–3.

33 Al-Haskafi, Risala fi al-ʿamal bi-l-dafatir al-sultaniyya, 4b–5b.

34 Al-Haskafi, Risala fi al-ʿamal bi-l-dafatir al-sultaniyya, 5b–6a.

35 Al-Haskafi, Risala fi al-ʿamal bi-l-dafatir al-sultaniyya, 6b–7a.

36 Johansen, “Formes de langage”, 366–9.

37 On Ottoman dynastic law, see Burak, Guy, “Between the ḳānūn of Qāytbāy and Ottoman Yasaq: a note on the Ottomans’ dynastic law”, Journal of Islamic Studies 26/1, 2015, 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the bibliography therein.

38 Several studies have pointed to the connection between the Ottoman state bureaucracy and ḳānūn – so much so that the chief chancellor, the bearer of the sultanic stamp (the nişancı) was occasionally called “the mufti of ḳānūn”. Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali (1541–1600) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 92–5.

Even a brief survey of late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman legal codes (ḳānūnnāmes) reveals the interest of the Ottoman dynasty and its ruling elite in regulating the record-keeping and archival practices throughout the empire. See, for example, Ahmed Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnāmeleri ve Hukukī Tahlilleri (Istanbul: Fey Vakfı, 1990–), 2: 62, 69, 235, 269–70; 3: 101, 157–60, 313, 325–6; and 4: 395, 548. Ottoman advice literature is also concerned with record-keeping. In his book of advice, the Asafname, Lütfi Paşa (d. 1563) urges the vezir to “register the documents of the people in the registers in the divan-hane. Every thirty years a [register] has to be produced [,,,] The old registers and the new ones should be collated, no one should be missing from the old register.” Lütfi Paşa, Asafname (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1982), 27.

39 A comprehensive study of the history of al-Nuʿaymi's al-Daris would require an examination of the extant manuscripts of the work from the Ottoman period. In addition, it would require a study of the ways in which Ottoman bureaucrats made use of the Daris. These aspects of the Daris are beyond the scope of this article.

40 Al-Daris was apparently a work in progress, and it is quite possible that the version of al-Daris that has come down to us was in fact the product of a circle of scholars who studied with al-Nuʿaymī. As one of al-Nuʿaymi's students reveals in the introduction to what seems to be one of the recensions of the work, al-Nuʿaymi kept a draft of al-Daris for a long time, and it was this student who insisted on producing a clean version (tabyīḍ) of it, while abridging some of the entries and biographies. This student entitled the clean version Tanbih al-talib wa-irshad al-daris. The student's introduction, however, makes it very clear that al-Nuʿaymi entitled his work in progress al-Daris fī taʾrikh al-madaris. See ʿAbd al-Qadir b. Muhammad al-Nuʿaymi, al-Daris fī taʾrikh al-madaris (Damascus: Matbaʿat al-Taraqqi, 1948), 1: 3–6. See also the introduction by Jaʿfar al-Hasani to the Damascene edition of al-Daris: Ibid., i, ba–dal. The corpus was apparently known as al-Daris fī taʾrikh al-madaris, although Katip Çelebi in his biographical compendium Kashf al-zunun mentions the Tanbih but does not mention al-Daris. In addition to this student, who may have been Shams al-Din b. Tulun, several Damascene jurists compiled abbreviated versions (mukhtaṣar) of the Daris. In his Kashf al-zunun, Katip Çelebi says that al-Nuʿaymi compiled the work but an abbreviated version was compiled by ʿAbd al-Basit al-Waʿith al-Dimashqi (Katip Çelebi, Kashf al-zunun ʿan asami al-kutub wa-l-funun [Istanbul: Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1971], 1:487). On al-Nuʿaymi, see also Najm al-Din Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Ghazzi, al -Kaw a kib al-saʾira bi-aʿyan al-miʾa al-ʿashira (Beirut: Jamiʿat Bayrut al-Amirikiyya, 1945–58), 1:250; and Toru Miura, “The Salihiyya Quarter of Damascus at the beginning of Ottoman rule: the ambiguous relations between religious institutions and waqf properties”, in Peter Sluglett and Stefan Weber (eds), Syria and Bilad al-Sham under Ottoman Rule: Essays in Honour of Abdul-Karim Rafeq (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 269–91.

41 Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 19.

42 The literature on taʾrīkh and Islamic historiography is quite vast. For one of the most comprehensive treatments of taʾrīkh, see Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On taʾrikh in Ottoman Damascus, see Dana Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

43 Al-Haskafi, Risala fi al-ʿamal bi-l-dafatir al-sultaniyya, fo. 6a.

44 Miura, “Salihiyya Quarter of Damascus”, 273.

45 Johansen, “Formes de langage”, 360–63.

46 On Ibn ʿAbidin, see, for example, Haim Gerber, Islamic Law and Culture 1600–1840 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Calder, Norman, “The ‘Uqūd rasm al-muftī’ of Ibn ʿĀbidīn”, BSOAS 63/2, 2000, 215–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wael B. Hallaq, “A prelude to Ottoman reform: Ibn Ābidīn on custom and legal change”, in Israel Gershoni, Hakan Erdem and Usrula Woköck (eds), Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 37–61.

47 Muhammad Hibat Allah b. Muhammad al-Taji al-Baʿali, Al-Tahqiq al-bahir fi sharḥ al-Ashbah wa-l-nazaʾir (Firestone Library, Princeton, MS Garrett no. 198Y).

48 Johansen, “Formes de langage”, 369–72.

49 See n. 17 above.

50 See, for example, Yenişehirli Abdullah Efendi, Behcetü'l-fetava maan-nükul (Istanbul, 1849?), 214. In addition, Yenişehirli ʿAbdullah Efendi deals in other fatāwā with the issue of proper recording (tescîl şerʿî) of endowments. Ibid., 214–6.

51 Khayr al-Din al-Ramli, al-Fatawa al-khayriyya li-nafʿ al-bariyya ʿala madhhab al-Imam al-Aʿzam Abi Hanifa al-Nuʿman (Beirut: Dar al-Maʿrifa, 1974–), 1, 119.

52 Johansen, “Formes de langage”, 369–72.

53 On al-Ramli, see, for instance, Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Tucker, “The exemplary life of Khayr al-Dīn al-Ramlī”, in Mary Ann Fay (ed.), Auto/Biography and the Construction of Identity and Community in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 9–17; Gerber, Islamic Law and Culture; and Joseph, Sabrina, “An analysis of Khayr al-Din al-Ramli's fatawa on peasant land tenure in seventeenth-century Palestine”, Arab Studies Journal, 6/7, 1998–99, 112–27Google Scholar.

54 Mundy and Saumarez-Smith, Governing Property, chs 2–3; Burak, Guy, “Faith, law and empire in the Ottoman ‘Age of Confessionalization’ (fifteenth–seventeenth centuries): the case of ‘Renewal of Faith’”, Mediterranean Historical Review 28/1, 2013, 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Johansen, Baber, “Signs as evidence: the doctrine of Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1351) on proof”, Islamic Law and Society 9/2, 2002, 168–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Ibn ʿAbidin, Hashiyat radd al-muhtar, 5, 435–6.

57 Ottoman court records and their features have attracted much attention in recent decades. See, for example, Ze'evi, Dror, “The use of Ottoman Sharīʿa court records as a source for Middle Eastern social history: a reappraisal”, Islamic Law and Society 5/1, 1998, 35–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court in Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Boğaç Ergene, Local Courts, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

58 Hallaq, “The ‘qāḍī's dīwān (sijill)’”, 436.

59 Ahmad b. ʿUmar al-Khassaf, Kitab adab al-qadi (Cairo: al-Jamiʿa al-Amrikiyya bi-al-Qahira, 1978), 57–8. Ibn Maza, who commented on al-Khassaf's work, argued that the diwān can be transferred lawfully to a single secretary instead of two. ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Sadr al-Shahid (Ibn Maza), Sharh adab al-qadi li-l-Khassaf (Baghdad: Wizarat al-Awqaf, 1977–78), 1, 258–63.

60 Lydon, Ghislaine, “A paper economy of faith without faith in paper: a reflection on Islamic institutional history”, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 71, 2009, 658 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.