The Mecelle, Sharia, and the Ottoman State: Fashioning and Refashioning of Islamic Law in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

This article addresses one of the key debates in the field of Islamic legal studies concerning the transmutation of Islamic law into state law. Two arguments are advanced in this regard: (1) It is contended that the codification of Islamic law in the late nineteenth century was primarily justified in relation to the existing legal genres within the Hanafi school. The drafters of the Mecelle affirmed that it was inspired by the work of the Egyptian Hanafi jurist Zayn Ibn Nujaym (d. 970/1562–3); (2) It is proposed that the emergence of the Mecelle should be understood, not in terms of an epistemic break from the premodern Islamic legal reasoning, but in terms of a continuation and transformation within the legal tradition. The Mecelle cannot exist without dependence upon and articulation with previously existing norms and legal literature. The Mecelle did not appear ex nihilo, as a legal framework alien and opposed to the existing legal literature and legal order, but necessarily emerged out of the existing legal genre of Hanafi legal maxims.