The Sultan's Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550-1650 by .

Metin Kunt Review by: Bruce Masters Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Jul., 1988), pp. 226-228 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/544985 . Accessed: 10/12/2012 11:14
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Marchands d'htoffes du Fayyoum au III/IX siecle d'apres leurs archives (actes et lettres). Vol. 1. Les Actes des Banu cAbd al-Mu'min. Vol. 2. La Correspondance administrative et privie des Banu SAbdal-Mu'min. By YusuF RAGIB. Supplements aux Annales islamologiques, cahiers nos. 2 and 5. Cairo: Institut Franqais d'Archeologie Orientale, 1982 and 1985. Vol. 1, pp. xxi + 47 + 13 pls.; Vol. 2, pp. vi + 106 + 37 pls. Although many Arabic papyri have been published--not a few of them from the Fayyim-most are isolated documents: letters without replies, contracts between persons otherwise unknown to us, etc. The late Jean David-Weill first called scholarly attention to a number of papyri of the third century A.H. in the Louvre that formed part of a coherent group of related documents, but his untimely death prevented him from carrying out his plan to publish them. Fortunately, this work has been undertaken by Yisuf Ragib, who presents fifty-four of these documents in the two volumes under review.The remainingLouvre documents identified by David-Weill, plus many additional ones belonging to the same archive that Ragib has located in the collections at Paris, London, Berlin, and Vienna, will appear in four further volumes. The twelve documents published in vol. 1 are mostly contracts of sale (nos. 2-10) but also include a contract of partnership (no. 1), a marriage contract (no. 11), and a waqfdocument (no. 12), all forming part of the personal correspondence and records of the merchant and notary Abi Hurayra Jacfar ibn Ahmad ibn CAbdal-Mu'min. The forty-two documents published in vol. 2 include one petition addressed by AbUi Hurayra to an unknown authority requesting him to intercede against some parties who had molested his brother (no. 29); a large number of letters to or from AbUi Hurayra or his close relatives (nos. 1-28, 30-38); and four letters of unknown correspondents, included here because they were written on the back of other documents published in the volume. Each document is given in edited form with translation and a photo of the original in the plates, and accompanied by a brief analysis of

content and notes on the readings proposed. Although only very close scrutiny of the texts and the proposed solutions can provide a final judgment on the accuracy of the renditions offered, a few quick probes convince me that the editor has largely succeeded in meeting the challenge of providing an accurate reading. The difficulty of preparing such papyri properly will be well known to anyone who has ever tried to work with them, and we must be grateful to Yisuf Ragib for having taken on this arduous task. When the series is complete, it will be comparable in importance only to some of the groups of documents from the Cairo Geniza, perhaps, as a source of information about the social and economic life of medieval Egypt. Already the papyri edited in these two volumes begin to give us a sense for what the life and affairs of one family of Muslim merchants was really like, and we eagerly await the appearance of the remaining four volumes.
FRED M. DONNER

TheUniversity of Chicago

The Sultan's Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 15501650. By i. METIN New York: ColumKUNT. bia University Press, 1983. Pp. xxiii + 181. $32.50. Prosopography has proven itself a useful means to approach the institutional and social history of societies and classes for whose members extensive biographical information is either no longer extant or was never kept. As an historiographical device it has seen its most extensive application in the fields of preindustrial European and North American history, but it has also been used with success by Ottomanists such as N. Itzkowitz, C. Findley, J. Shinder, and M. Zilfi. These studies have for the most part, however, been confined to the civil/ military and religious bureaucracies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period for which a wealth of documentation remains.

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JULY 1988

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In The Sultan's Servants, 1. Metin Kunt employs a similar methodology to examine an earlier and less well documented, if no less critical, period of change for the Empire to see if collective biography might provide further clues to the process by which the basic unit of Ottoman provincial government was transformed from the sancak (district) to the eyalet (province). The manifestations of the crisis experienced by the Ottomans in the years between 1550 and 1650 are well documented and have been studied elsewhere. What is new in this work is the analysis of how the tensions of the period affected the makeup of the Empire's top provincial bureaucracy. To accomplish this, Metin Kunt isolates the individuals who held the district governorships in seven provinces for three periods chosen randomly from throughout the century to create a representative sample. The provinces are divided further into core and frontier provinces, and while it might be argued that Aleppo (Halep) was not truly on the frontier, the distinction between the two categories seems well taken, since Ottoman administration in the border regions often incorporated local talent to a degree not found in the center. Having identified these individuals, the author examines their career backgrounds, term of office, the time spent waiting between appointments, and the extent to which they were appointed to positions in the same region, a process he sees as being a conscious effort to produce area specialists. The resulting pattern he uncovers is at once convincing and interesting,for it demonstrates a narrowing of career opportunities as a larger pool of candidates became available for higher office. This was accompanied by an increase in the time, and most probably the money, required to obtain an appointment, as well as the growing importance attached to the households from which the candidates came. Besides this vision of a bureaucracy with crumbling standards beset by nepotism and greed which seems to confirm the received interpretation that something went dreadfully wrong in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the sixteenth century, an important contribution of this work lies in its clarification of the term kul. Literally "slave,"Kunt shows that its mean-

ing was closer to "servant" or even "subject." The implication of this is to call into question much of what has been written about the role of slaves in Ottoman government, in particular, and in various other Muslim states, in general. A further service the author provides to all students of Ottoman history is his very clear explanations of the Ottoman terms dirlik and has and his linking of the decline in the dirlik system to the transformation of the provincial administration. The only real problems with the author's overall thesis, unfortunately, comes in his conclusion. There he states that the decline of the dirlik system could perhaps be considered a process of "modernization" in that it was a shift away from "feudalism." Even though he puts both terms in quotes, the assertion is confusing, since he states in the next paragraph that the dirlik system was not comparable to feudalism. The contradiction lies in his linking the transition from feudal to modern to a greater monetarization of the economy and not to changes in the control of land, i.e., the rise of the giftlik system and the relationship between the provincial leadership and the center. Another generalized, undocumented conclusion occurs in the last paragraph where he states, was largelyintendedfor poliCapitalaccumulation tical aims, rather than for economic investments. the future else,determined This,morethananything withEuropeat the threshcourseof Ottomanrivalry andledto a declineof revolution old of the industrial Ottomanfortunesrelativeto the increasing mightof an industrializedand imperialisticEurope in the nineteenth century. This might have been more convincing had he demonstrated an inclination on the part of the Umerato invest in production before the transition. The example of the entrepreneurialDervig is interesting, but his career Mehmed Papa the end of the comes toward period being studied, and, standing alone, does not document a trend in any direction. This work is an English translation and revision of an earlier Turkish edition entitled Sancaktan Eyalete, published by Bogazigi University in 1978. As the author states in his

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introduction to the English edition, it contains a more general introduction to the subject than is found in Turkish. Furthermore, the lists of sancaks in the Turkish version have been eliminated and parts of the text have been relegated to appendixes in English. On the whole, the difference between the two is minimal, however. Whether in Turkish or English, this work is a welcome addition to the growing body of work on Ottoman institutional history for its use of the methodology of prosopography, its clarification of various Ottoman institutions, and the insights it provides into the very troubled period for the Ottomans at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries.
BRUCEMASTERS

Wesleyan University

On Schacht's Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. By G. M. AZAMI.Riyadh: King Saud University and London: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1985. Pp. 236. Joseph Schacht's views both on the authenticity of hadTth in general and as the basis of Islamic law in particular are well known. An intense controversy has raged over both these views among Western scholars of Islam and among Muslims as well. The Western critics of Schacht, although they do not accept his sweeping conclusions, have, nevertheless, been influenced by his views to some extent. It should be pointed out that modern, systematic analysis of hadith began with Ignaz Goldziher's Muhammadanische Studien, vol. 2, although Schacht applied that analysis specifically to the legal hadith materials and in much greater detail and added his main finding that isnads, or transmission chains, were projected backwards to the Prophet from the two succeeding generations. The evaluations of Schacht's work so far, however, have been only very general. In my Islam (chap. 3), I analyzed Schacht's positions in considerable detail and subjected them to a severe criticism; nevertheless, my critique re-

mained at a theoretical level, and I did not work with actual hadith materials. It is for the first time that we have work like Azami's; he has devoted literally years of research to the investigation of hadith and has analyzed, tested, and passed scholarly judgment on Schacht's argument step by step, working with actual hadith materials. This book is, indeed, an effective response to Schacht. The catalogue of issues where Azami has found fault with Schacht's treatment of cases of various traditions, his oversights, his misinterpretations, etc., is so long (in fact, Azami's whole work is full of these examples) that only a few examples can be dealt with in a review. In fact, I will cite only two here. On pages 86 and 87, Azami quotes Schacht who says, "The Iraqian thesis of the over-riding authority of traditions from the Prophet is definitely relegated to a subordinate place by the importance which the Iraqians attach, in theory and practice, to traditions from Companions. We find this principle explicitly formulated in many places, for instance, Tr. I, 89." This statement clearly indicates that Iraqi jurists attached much greater importance to traditions from the Companions than those from the Prophet himself. But Azami then quotes the original text of al-Shdfici to which Schacht had referred. This turns out to be something totally different: the passage does not at all talk of the relative worth, for the Iraqis, of traditions from the Prophet and those from the Companions but simply states that Iraqis claim that they never oppose (any opinion) of the Companions. AlShafici, however, goes on to accuse the Iraqis of having opposed the opinion of the Caliph cUmar in a certain case. I shall draw the second example from a large number of problematic cases discussed by Schacht where he seeks to prove that traditions arose in the period that elapsed between certain narrators-where the earlier authority does not quote a certain hadith which he may be expected to quote but the later authority quotes it. In Islam, I praised this approach to the critique of hadith but warned that it has to be wielded carefully, for it is possible that if the time span between the two authorities is not very big, it may be rash to judge the tradition

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