Towards an Ottoman Conceptual History 441
must have been evident that the place of justice within the system of Ottoman
political values gradually waned during the eighteenth century.
3.2 Law and “The Old Law” (kanun, kanun-i kadim)
According to the famous thesis promoted first and foremost by Halil İnalcık,
the concept of a law that has to be kept, and which is an indispensable part
of rulership, was a contribution of Central Asian Turkic tradition to Ottoman
political thought and practice. İnalcık remarks that, in the Persian tradition,
the ruler’s authority is actually above the law, his only limitation being the
care for justice.29 Indeed, authors nearer to this tradition tend to downplay
the role of the law: in Ahmedi’s famous account of the Mongols, the “law” is
something that can be oppressive and may “pass for justice” to some extent; in
the same way, justice is more important than a hard law in Şeyhoğlu’s work. As
for Kınalızade, his criticism of the Mongol yasa is almost explicitly an attack
on Ebussu’ud and Celalzade’s use of sultanly law or kanun as a form of legisla-
tion de facto superior to the Sharia.
The term kanun was not an Ottoman invention. Al-Ghazali had written
that the faqih knows the “political/administrative norms” (qanun al-siyasa),30
while for siyasa al-shariyya writers (such as Ibn Taymiyya) this was a concept
peculiar to the sultan, who may change the rules ad libitum provided they do
not contradict (very much) the Sharia. In mid-sixteenth century Ottoman
usage, at least, kanun seemed arguably to have had the meaning of “lawful”,
“necessary”, and even “permissible” or “habitual”.31 What really distinguishes
Ottoman ideas about the “law” from other Islamicate formulations is the glo-
rification of “oldness”; in other words, the idea that the sultan does not grant
laws on the basis of his own justice but rather they come from the established
laws of his ancestors to which he must abide. In this respect, one should note
that the connection of Ottoman law (yasak/kanun) with the eponymous dy-
nasty is a recurring feature of both Ottoman statesmen and Arab jurists who
opposed them.32 In Kitâbu mesâlih (c. 1560) there is an ambiguous attitude
(old laws are not necessarily good, if made by mediocre viziers), but by the
end of the sixteenth century (at the latest) kanun had become almost iden-
tical with “the old law” or kanun-i kadim, a kind of constitution set by the
great sultans of old.33 The reader might remember that one of, if not the,
29 İnalcık 1967, 267–269. Late Byzantine “mirrors for princes” also stress the need for the
monarch to obey the laws (Paidas 2006, 81–83).
30 Laoust 1970, 197.
31 Tezcan 2000, 659–660. This also seems to have been the common meaning of kanun in
the Mamluk sources: Burak 2015, 7–8.
32 Burak 2015, 15–20.
33 Cf. the general surveys in Öz 2010 and Yılmaz 2015b.