Please join us for a webinar with Professor Samy Ayoub to discuss his recent book “Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Hanafi Jurisprudence.”
In this book, Ayoub examines Ottoman imperial authority in authoritative Hanafi legal works from the Ottoman world of the 16th to 19th centuries CE, casting new light on the understudied late Hanafi jurists. The book demonstrates that late Hanafi jurists assigned probative value and authority to the orders and edicts of the Ottoman sultan, reflected in the sultan’s ability to settle juristic disputes, to order specific opinions to be adopted in legal opinions (fatawa) and to establish his orders as authoritative and final reference points. The incorporation of sultanic orders into authoritative Hanafi legal commentaries, treatises, and fatwa collections was made possible by a shift in Hanafi legal commitments that embraced sultanic authority as an indispensable element of the lawmaking process.
Featuring:
- Samy Ayoub, Assistant Professor of Law and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin
- Mary Elston, Visiting Fellow, Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, as Discussant