The Imperial Heyday 101
areas of “secular” law that contradicted the Sharia (e.g. the concept of “state
land” and the use of monetary fines) and reformulate them in terms of Hanafi
jurisprudence so as to make them fit. The selection of the Hanafi school itself
as the “official” school in Ottoman jurisprudence, or in other words the insti-
tutionalization of law and the firm connection of jurisprudence with the state
(a process carried out through the institution of a state-appointed şeyhülislam,
the formation of an imperial system of legal education, and ultimately the rise
of an Ottoman canon of jurisprudence), was an Ottoman novelty—although,
as shown recently by Guy Burak, it was a novelty shared in a common legal
culture by other post-Mongol Islamicate dynasties of the region as well, such
as the Timurids and the Mughals.6 On the other hand, jurists (especially in
the Arab provinces, it seems) kept having recourse to various schools of law
in what was recently termed “pragmatic eclecticism”; in this context, with the
adoption of the Hanafi school by the Ottomans, Hanafism acquired a “semi-
default status” in practice, rather than an all-defining one (although Ottoman
elites did try to enforce or at least promote Hanafi judges even in predomi-
nantly non-Hanafi provinces).7
As will be seen, Ebussu’ud followed a path that had already been taken
in Mamluk Egypt,8 yet the extent and efficiency to which he combined state
priorities with Hanafi jurisprudence makes his synthesis, in a way, the work
of Ottoman political thought par excellence. In other words, he gave a prac-
tical answer to the question that had occupied the minds of Muslim politi-
cal thinkers for centuries, namely how to reconcile secular authority with the
all-encompassing power of the Sharia in the absence of a legitimate caliph
(although, as we shall see, there were also other ways to overcome the latter
problem). It seems that, contrary to the common belief that Sunni jurists gen-
erally disregarded state laws, in the Ottoman case Ebussu’ud’s enterprise was
successful and Hanafi jurists incorporated Ottoman edicts (as well as archival
practice) into their legal reasoning well into the eighteenth century.9
6 Burak 2013. The adoption of the Hanafi school by the Ottomans had started at the beginning
of the fifteenth century, but was made clear in the Süleymanic years and especially after
the conquest of Baghdad (1535), when Süleyman visited Abu Hanifa’s tomb and ordered its
reconstruction.
7 Ibrahim 2015. In the shift from ijtihad (interpretative freedom) to taqlid (legal conformism
to an established corpus of jurisdictions), this eclecticism provided a flexibility necessary
for the Muslim populations (in the same way, Christian subjects often had recourse to the
Muslim courts in order to enjoy the same kind of flexibility). On the promotion of the Hanafi
school by the Ottoman elite in Egypt see Hathaway 2003.
8 Johansen 1988; Ayoub 2016, 244–250.
9 Ayoub 2016; Burak 2016.