2 The multi-lingual culture of Ottoman Egypt means there is no easy solution to the problem of transliteration. As this paper is based on documents in Ottoman Turkish, phrases and technical terms drawn from the documents are transliterated using the system for Ottoman Turkish. The names of Egyptian people and places, however, are written in Arabic transliteration, as are terms not used in these documents that are more familiar in their Arabic form (e.g. sharīʿa). Arabic- and Turkish-origin words found in English dictionaries are spelled as in English.

3 Ziftā is in Gharbīya province, roughly half way between al-Zaqāzīq and Ṭanṭā.

4 vażʿ-ı ḳadīmini tağyīr eyleyüb.

5 Prime Ministry Archive, Ottoman Section, Istanbul (hereafter PMA). Şikayet Kalemi, box 1, folder 93. This document is dated only with the year 1155 (1742–43). The date has been given by an archivist; no date is mentioned in the text of the petition itself.

6 el-Nahal, Gamal, The Judicial Administration of Ottoman Egypt in the Seventeenth Century (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1979), 76Google Scholar.

7 Whether or not Muṣṭafā had approached the Şeyhülislām himself is not clear from the document. It is plausible that he might have done – the petition shows that he was willing and able to correspond with Istanbul. However, it is also possible that he had a copy of a previously issued fatwa taken from one of several fatwa collections that circulated in the empire.

8 The Dīvān-i Hümāyūn was the imperial council held at Topkapı Palace and presided over by the Grand Vizier.

9 There are few works focusing on petitioning. Suraiya Faroqhi, Halil İnalcık and Haim Gerber have studied petitioning, but they focus only on the use of petitions by subjects to complain about abuses carried out by government officials. While all three recognize that many petitions concerned private disputes, they exclude these from their enquiries as they are not relevant to their concerns. See Faroqhi, “Political initiatives ‘from the bottom up’ in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire: some evidence for their existence”, in Majer, Hans Georg (ed.), Osmanistische Studien zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte: in memoriam Vanco Boskov (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1986), 24–33Google Scholar; Faroqhi, “Political activity among Ottoman taxpayers and the problem of Sultanic legitimation (1570–1650)”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 35, 1992, 1–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; İnalcık, “Arz-ı Hal ve Arz-ı Mahzarlar”, in İnalcık, Osmanlı’da Devlet, Hukuk, Adalet (Istanbul: Eren, 2000), 49–71Google Scholar; Gerber, State, Society and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 127–73Google Scholar. An article by Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr on women petitioners does deal with petitions concerning private disputes. Zarinebaf-Shahr gives an interesting analysis of the petitioners and their motivations, but her argument that the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn handled matters of state law (ḳānūn) while kadis handled matters of sharīʿa is not convincing, partly because it does not match her own evidence (which includes several petitions concerning inheritance matters), and partly because it relies on a neat division between ḳānūn and sharīʿa that cannot be sustained. See Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Women, law and imperial justice in Ottoman Istanbul in the late seventeenth century”, in Sonbol, Amira el-Azhary (ed.), Women, the Family and Divorce Laws in Islamic History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 81–95Google Scholar.

10 For this traditional narrative, see Winter, Michael, Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, 1517–1798 (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marsot, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid, A History of Egypt: from the Arab Conquest to the Present Day, 2^nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 48–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 The first major study to challenge this traditional narrative was Hathaway, Jane, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: the Rise of the Qazdağlıs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. See also Hathaway's numerous other works. Alan Mikhail has recently studied this issue from the novel angle of environmental history, examining the role of Istanbul in the management of Egypt's natural resources during the eighteenth century. See Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: an Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Mikhail, “An irrigated empire: the view from Ottoman Fayyum”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, 2010, 569–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 This interpretation dates back to the pioneering work of Ronald Jennings in the 1970s. See especially his “Limitations of the judicial powers of the kadi in 17^th-century Ottoman Kayseri”, Studia Islamica 50, 1979, 151–84Google Scholar, in which he argues that the Sultan did not intervene in the kadi of Kayseri's decisions, but rather “practiced a policy of judicial non-interference” (p. 152). Jennings thought it likely that the provincial governor sometimes interfered in the affairs of the kadi, although he did not find much evidence of it in the period he studied. Jennings thought that such interference would have exceeded the provincial governor's legitimate authority, and that the kadi could have resisted by appealing to the Sultan (pp. 154–5). Jennings’ view has been adopted by other Ottomanists, most importantly Haim Gerber, and in Wael Hallaq's recent synthesis of Islamic legal history. See Gerber, State, Society and Law in Islam, 58–78Google Scholar; Hallaq, Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 208–21Google Scholar. Recently, several scholars have argued that this interpretation should be qualified. Eyal Ginio has shown that in Salonica the central government intervened in some court cases, usually on behalf of Salonicans who had allies in the palace: see “Patronage, intervention and violence in the legal process in eighteenth-century Salonica and its province”, in Shaham, Ron (ed.), Law, Custom and Statute in the Muslim World: Studies in Honor of Aharon Layish (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 118–25Google Scholar. Boğaç Ergene established that provincial governors and other military officials were frequently involved in the judicial process in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Çankırı and Kastamonu: significantly, Ergene suggests that such involvement may have been regarded as legitimate. See Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu 1652–1744 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 170–77Google Scholar.

13 Nevertheless, responses to petitions were still sometimes copied into the Mühimme Defterleri after this point. Systematic classification was attempted but not fully achieved.

14 Linda Darling concludes that there are circumstantial reasons to believe that the seventeenth century saw an increase in petitioning, but offers no archival proof: Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1660 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 246 ffGoogle Scholar.

15 Accordingly, they have been the main source used by students of petitioning.

16 The mundanity of many of the entries in these registers assures us that petitions were not selected for inclusion on the grounds of their significance. One complication, however, is that there were several different places where bureaucrats could file responses to petitions. There is also a further known unknown: these registers contain responses to petitions, and it is possible that the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn did not always respond.

17 Başak Tuğ is a recent exception: “Politics of honor: the institutional and social frontiers of ‘illicit’ sex in mid eighteenth-century Anatolia”, PhD dissertation, New York University, 2009, 97–172. Some earlier scholars looked at original petitions from a palaeographic and diplomatic angle, e.g. Velkov, Asparouch, “Les notes complémentaires dans les documents financiers ottomans des XVI^e–XVIII^e siècles (étude diplomatique et paléographique)”, Turcica 11, 1979, 37–77Google Scholar; İnalcık, Halil, “Osmanlı Bürokrasisinde Aklam ve Muamelat”, Osmanlı Araştırmaları 1, 1980, 2–14Google Scholar.

18 Linda Darling, in a comment limited to petitions on tax matters directed to the finance ministry, suggests that the scribes may have burned them for warmth (Revenue-raising, 252).

19 Richard Wittmann, “Before Qadi and Grand Vizier: intra-communal dispute resolution and legal transactions among Christians and Jews in the plural society of seventeenth-century Istanbul”, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2008, 149.

20 Evliyā writes of the eṣnāf-i kātib-i ʿarżuḥālciyān: “Dukkān ve neferāt ḳırḳ beş. İçlerinde yine Ervām'dan serīʿü’l-ḳalem kimesneler vardır”. Çelebi, Evliyā, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi 10. kitap, ed. Kahraman, Seyit Ali, Dağlı, Yücel and Dankoff, Robert (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2007), 202Google Scholar.

21 Faroqhi highlights the importance of appeals to established practice in “Political activity among Ottoman taxpayers”, 5–6.

22 Imber, Colin, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 153Google Scholar.

23 Wittmann cites examples in “Before Qadi and Grand Vizier”, 129–30.

24 Edward A. Kracke, Jr. gives an overview of the rituals associated with petitioning in various cultural traditions in “Early visions of justice for the humble in East and West”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 96, 1976, 492–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 al-Damurdāshī, Aḥmad, Kitāb al-Durra al-muṣāna fī akhbār al-kināna: fī akhbār mā waqaʿa bi Miṣr fī dawlat al-mamālīk, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (Cairo: Institut français d'archéologie orientale, 1989), 40–41Google Scholar; al-Damurdāshī, Aḥmad, Al-Damurdashi's Chronicle of Egypt, 1688–1755: al-Durra al-musana fi akhbar al-kinana, ed. and trans. Crecelius, Daniel and Bakr, ʿAbd al-Wahhab (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 79–81Google Scholar.

26 The seven regiments present in Egypt were the Janissaries (usually called Mustaḥfiẓān in Arabic sources), ʿAzebān, Müteferriḳa, Çerākise, Gönüllüyān, Tüfekçiyān and the Çavuşān.

27 Damurdāshī, Kitāb al-Durra al-muṣāna, 78–9; Damurdāshī, Al-Damurdashi's Chronicle, 139–42.

28 Heywood, Colin, “The Ottoman Menzilhane and Ulak system in Rumeli in the eighteenth century”, in Halil, Osman Okyar andİnalcık (eds), Türkiye'nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Tarihi, 1071–1920 (Ankara: Meteksan, 1980), 179–86Google Scholar; Heywood, “The Via Egnatia in the Ottoman period: the Menzilhanes of the Sol Kol in the late 17^th / early 18^th century”, in Zachariadou, Elizabeth (ed.), The Via Egnatia under Ottoman Rule, 1380–1699 (Rethymnon: Crete University Press, 1996), 129–44Google Scholar.

29 Faroqhi cites an example of a group of petitioners who hired a messenger to convey their petition: “Political activity among Ottoman taxpayers”, 2. It was probably more common for petitioners to use established courier networks. To my knowledge there is no scholarship on courier networks operating within the Ottoman empire, but Gagan Sood has studied private courier networks in eighteenth-century India and shown that they also carried mail between India and the Ottoman empire. He suggests that the situation within the Ottoman empire was similar to that in India, where courier services were linked to trading networks. See Sood, “Correspondence is equal to half a meeting: the composition and comprehension of letters in eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, 2007, 172–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sood, “The informational fabric of eighteenth-century India and the Middle East: couriers, intermediaries and postal communication”, Modern Asian Studies 43, 2009, 1085–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Yerasimos, Stephane, Les voyageurs dans l'empire ottoman, XIV^e–XVI^e siècles (Ankara: Imprimerie de la société turque d'histoire, 1991), 67Google Scholar.

31 al-Ghanī, Aḥmad Shalabī ibn ʿAbd, Awḍaḥ al-ishārāt fī man tawallā Miṣr al-Qāhira min al-wuzara’ wa'l-bāshāt, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (Cairo: Maktabat al-khānjī, 1978), 209Google Scholar.

32 Imperial orders were always inscribed in a particular place in the register (the first few pages), rather than sequentially with the rest of the register's contents. So it is not possible to date their arrival with any accuracy by reference to the dates of the entries that surround them – each register covers a year or more.

33 Egyptian National Archive, Cairo. Sijillāt maḥkamat al-Bāb al-ʿĀlī, register 139, p. 4; register 167 mukarrar, unnumbered page before page 1, first entry.

34 In this respect the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn's procedure resembled that of the Mamluk maẓālim system. According to Jorgen Nielsen, while the Mamluk Sultan sometimes held public hearings, these were exceptional: most petitions were dealt with without a hearing. See Nielsen, Secular Justice in an Islamic State: Maẓālim under the Baḥrī Mamlūks 662/1264–789/1387 (Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1985), 63–75Google Scholar.

35 In the story cited above of the rival regiments, both parties to the dispute petitioned simultaneously. This story is the only reference I have found to a case of this sort. Undoubtedly, in most cases only one party submitted a petition; the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn certainly never solicited input from the other party.

36 PMA, Divan Kalemi, box 77, folder 64. The petition itself is not dated, but the date of its arrival is noted: late Rebīʿü’s-sānī 1087 (3–11 July 1676).

37 The usual phrase was şerʿle görülmek.

38 evḳāfın neẓāreti evlād ve evlādına meşrūṭ idüb.

39 Majer, Hans Georg (ed.), Das osmanische Registerbuch der Beschwerden (Şikayet Defteri) vom Jahre 1675: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. mixt 683 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984)Google Scholar, f. 23a, 3^rd entry. The order is dated early Ẕī’l-ḳaʿde 1085 (27 January–5 February 1675). This volume is a facsimile of a stray Şikayet Defteri that ended up in the Austrian National Library, having been carried with the Ottoman camp during the late seventeenth-century Ottoman–Habsburg wars and lost on the battlefield, possibly during the siege of Vienna.

40 berāta mūcibince żabṭ itdirile. PMA, Şikayet Defteri 997 (listed in catalogue 980), p. 12, 1^st entry, late Cemāẕiyü’l-āhır 1140 (3–11 February 1728).

41 PMA, Atik Şikayet Defteri 28 (listed in catalogue 989), entry 45, late Cemāẕiyüʾl-evvel 1109 (5–14 December 1697).

42 The imperial order states that ʿĀyisha “came [to the palace] and petitioned” (gelüb ʿarżuḥāl idüb), rather than the more usual phrase, which was simply “petitioned” (ʿarżuḥāl idüb).

43 bāḳīsin virmekte taʿallül ü ʿınād itmeleriyle.

44 Majer, Das osmanische Registerbuch, f. 165b, 6^th entry, early Cemāẕiyü’l-evvel 1086 (24 July–2 August 1675).

45 Ergene, Local Court, 52; Ginio, “Patronage, intervention and violence”, 125–8.

46 The former owner inherited from his manumitted slave as his patron (mawlā). One confusing aspect of this document is that it specifies only that ʿUthmān had no children. There are several other categories of heir who precede the patron, including ascending male relatives, and male descendants of the deceased's father and grandfather. The text of the document itself, therefore, does not contain sufficient information to show that al-Ḥājj Muṣṭafā should have inherited ʿUthmān's estate. However, these imperial orders are often extremely terse, and only summarize the petitions to which they responded. The document does state that Muṣṭafā's claim had been confirmed by a kadi, who would presumably have ensured that ʿUthmān had no heirs prior to al-Ḥājj Muṣṭafā. It is certainly plausible that ʿUthmān would have had no traceable relatives: as a slave he was most probably imported from the Caucasus or from sub-Saharan Africa as a child or young man.

47 virāsetini isbāt ve yedine ḥuccet-i şerʿīye virilmekle.

48 PMA, Şikayet Defteri 28 (listed in catalogue 989), entry 3, late Cemāẕiyü’l-evvel 1109 (5–14 December 1697).

49 Muṣṭafā possessed a ḥuccet confirming his right, but as this ḥuccet was issued in Egypt and there is no indication that Muṣṭafā travelled to Istanbul, the palace was probably not able to check it.

50 Ursinus, Michael, “Petitions from Orthodox Church officials to the imperial Diwan, 1675”, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 18, 1994, 236–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard Wittmann, “Before Qadi and Grand Vizier”, 146.

51 Peirce, Leslie, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 282–5Google Scholar.

52 This is not to say that fatwas were always unimportant: a fatwa could be of value in litigation if an ambiguous or a controversial point of law was at stake, in which case the kadi would often defer to the mufti's judgment. But litigants frequently procured fatwas even when the legal basis of their claims was obvious: one example being al-Ḥājj Muṣṭafā, who introduced this article.

53 Peirce, Morality Tales, 284.

54 ibid., 283.

55 When testimony was presented as evidence, it was the kadi's responsibility to check whether it was valid. This did not, however, involve cross-examination or any assessment of the testimony's plausibility, but merely consisted of determining whether the person giving testimony was a suitable witness. If the required number of suitable witnesses was produced, their testimony was considered proof.

56 This comment is limited to Ottoman legal practice within the sharīʿa courts. Certain military officials (exactly which varied from province to province) were responsible for supervising moral infractions and marketplace activities and combined the function of police and magistrate. However, when an Ottoman subject suffered theft, vandalism of property, a violent attack, or the murder of a relative, he or she would have to sue the offender to obtain compensation and/or punishment.

57 The widespread use of agents (vükelā’), as well as the ʿarżuḥālcis mentioned above, served to disseminate legal expertise to those who had the right contacts or who could afford professional services, but plenty of litigants appeared in court alone.

58 Much like today, the threat of a costly battle could be used by a wealthy party to dissuade an adversary from litigation.

59 Winter, Egyptian Society, 111–3.

60 Faraḥāt, Muḥammad Nūr, al-Tārīkh al-ijtimāʿī li ’l-qānūn fī Miṣr al-ḥadītha (Kuwait: Dār saʿād al-ṣabāḥ, 1993), 191Google Scholar.

61 ʿAbd al-Rāziq Ibrāhīm ʿĪsā illustrates the difficulty of categorizing kadis as either Ottoman Turks or Arabs: kadis, or legal scholars in general, became “Ottoman” by virtue of their education, not their place of birth or language of upbringing. Arabic-speaking Egyptians could and did become Ottomans: some became Ottoman kadis who ended up being posted to Egypt. See ʿĪsā, Tārīkh al-qaḍā’ fī Miṣr al-ʿuthmānīya, 1517–1798 (Cairo: al-Hay'a al-Miṣrīya al-ʿāma li ’l-kitāb, 1998), 234–8Google Scholar.

62 The earliest surviving register (sijill) of the Ottoman governor of Egypt's tribunal known as al-Dīwān al-ʿĀlī, held at the Egyptian National Archive in Cairo, dates from 1741–43. It shows the governor playing an active role at the centre of Egyptian political and legal life. See James E. Baldwin, “Islamic law in an Ottoman context: resolving disputes in late 17^th/early 18^th-century Cairo”, PhD dissertation, New York University, 2010, 31–74.

63 Ottoman documents are often dated only to the first, middle or last ten days of the month (evāyil, evāsıṭ or evāhır). Months are usually abbreviated, and the digit indicating one thousand is often omitted from dates in the second millennium of the Muslim calendar. This date, then, is late Rebīʿü’s-sānī 1087.

64 This word could be read as vāris-i (heir of), but this does not make sense, as Muṣṭafā is the son, and therefore the heir, of Aḥmad, not the reverse.

65 Mid Rebīʿü’l-evvel 1077.

66 A vaḳıf is an endowment.

67 A berāt is an appointment deed issued by the Sultan.

68 A fermān is an imperial order.

69 A buyuruldu is an order.

70 A temessük is a title-deed.

71 Ḥuccet usually refers to a deed issued by a kadi confirming a transaction or a litigation. Here, however, the petitioner seems to be referring back to the four berāts he has just mentioned.

72 Emr means order, and was often used interchangeably with fermān. Here, the petitioner is referring to the fermān he cited previously.

73 A Sufi lodge.