102 chapter 3
Ebussu’ud did not compose any major treatise explaining the grounds of
his reformulation of the Ottoman sultanly-cum-customary law in Hanafi terms
(his most influential treatise was a commentary on the Quran, which became
fairly famous and highly-regarded).10 He produced an extraordinary number of
fetvas, which essentially formed Ottoman law in the Süleymanic era; further-
more, he also wrote commentaries on juristic issues and the Quran, as well as
legal treatises. By the time Ebussu’ud became şeyhülislam there was already a
huge amount of literature on fikh or Islamic jurisprudence regulating everyday
aspects of the Sharia or Islamic law; on the other hand, Ottoman sultans from
the late fifteenth century onwards had issued numerous law-codes (kanun-
names), especially on land-holding, tax, and penal issues, which in various
way departed from the precepts of the Sharia. Ebussu’ud’s task, as mentioned,
was to reconcile religious law with kanun or secular law in order to produce a
coherent body of legal precepts that would respond to the needs of a quasi-
feudal empire such as the Ottoman was in this period. In practice, what
Ebussu’ud did was to create Islamic foundations for a secular legal system, i.e.
to provide justifications based on Sharia-based stratagems and precepts for
institutions and practices that had a clearly secular basis; the emphasis on the
enhanced authority of the sultan was facilitated by Ebussu’ud’s redesignation
of the former as caliph. Moreover, Ebussu’ud’s rulings often had clearly politi-
cal goals, justifying the sultanly policies in various disputable issues (such as
the executions of princes Mustafa in 1553 and Bayezid in 1559, or breaking the
peace treaty with Venice in 1570).
With his legal devices, and in close collaboration with Süleyman (and per-
haps, to a lesser extent, with his successor Selim II), Ebussu’ud legitimized
current Ottoman practices under Islamic terms. In land-holding, Ebussu’ud
established state ownership over the land (a key notion for the Ottoman feu-
dal and taxing system), using an elaborate distinction between dominium emi-
nens, possession and usufruct, and redefined the relevant terminology (and
taxation) on the basis of traditional Hanafi theories on rent and loan. In order
to justify the same practice, his predecessor Kemalpaşazade had used the
Mamluk theory of “the death of the kharaj payer”, i.e. of individual ownership
being inherited by the public treasury and thus coming within the jurisdiction
of dynastic law. Ebussu’ud tried another Mamluk idea, the concept of land tax
as rent, before reverting to a subtler theory on the usufruct being delegated
to the peasant. In another one of the main legal controversies that erupted
in the mid-sixteenth century, that over religious endowments (vakf ) and
10 On Ebussu’ud’s Quranic commentary and its importance for Ottoman intellectual history,
see Naguib 2013.