Response

Leslie P. Peirce

Journal of Women's History, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 197-202
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2006.0023

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/194576

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2006 Book Forum: Leslie Peirce 197
Response

Leslie Peirce

I would like to begin by saying what a privilege it is for me to have three

new colleagues—Indrani Chatterjee, Julie Hardwick, and Patricia Skin-
ner—comment so thoughtfully on my work, and what an opportunity it is
for all of us to have this forum for the exchange of ideas and information
and even of good book titles. So I thank each commentator individually
for her insights and I also thank the editors of Journal of Women’s History
for making this exchange possible.
My immediate reactions upon reading the three essays were several.
The first was just plain excitement at the sheer volume of fascinating insights
that such a comparative project can spawn. At the simplest level, compara-
tive history has the power to highlight what is specific to the cultures we
study as well as what is universal, or at least trans-regional, either because
of the basic demands of human existence or the limited repertoire of mecha-
nisms available to governments in controlling their populations.
My second reaction was consciousness of my own shortcomings: I was
rather sorry I hadn’t thought of the incisive phrases that pepper the three
comments—learned normativity, collusion with the dominant discourse as
a positive tactic of women in court—which might have saved some pages
of labored explication. I also felt “unnerved,” to borrow from Hardwick’s
confession, by my ignorance of histories that ran on intersecting tracks
with the history I attempted to recount. My ignorance was willed to a
degree (this is not an excuse), as I sat myself mentally in Aintab in order
to work out what was going on locally and didn’t look much beyond the
surrounding region, except occasionally towards Istanbul. In the process,
I seem to have reinvented some wheels that might have moved the project
along more rapidly had I done more comparative reading.
In what follows, I will not comment for the most part on commonalities
among the histories featured here, since the reader can deduce these for
herself. I would rather use this space to raise a few bigger issues that stem
from (apparent) difference. But I cannot restrain myself from citing at least
a few shared features of which I am now aware as a result of reading the
three commentaries (those I cite are from Skinner’s): the matter of publica
fama, the transfer of land ownership to the person who had cultivated it
unchallenged, and the persecution as witches/heretics of older, resource-
less women. I am not sure why it is a pleasurable sensation to recognize
shared foibles, habits, and aspirations among peoples across time and

© 2006 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 18 No. 1, 197–202.

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space—perhaps it is our defensive attachment to the societies we study. It

may also be useful here, while I am getting things out of the way, to mark
one major difference that contributed to legal life in the Ottoman empire:
the tribal communities that populated the hinterlands of Ottoman Anato-
lia, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and even the Balkans, with its Gypsy communities.
One of the “backstories” to the evolution of Ottoman legal practice was the
challenge of controlling these fiercely independent and fractious sectors of
the population.
One of the big questions that was sparked by my reading of the com-
mentaries is whether there is a domain that can be isolated as “secular” in the
early modern Ottoman world. This question was inspired by Skinner’s rec-
ognition that tensions between religious and secular domains were shared
by Europeans and Ottomans, and Hardwick’s comments about the rise of
secular courts. “Secular” is a word I rarely use in my writing or teaching
(if I did use it in the book, the word is probably in quotes). We would not,
I think, speak of a specifically secularist thrust, in the sense of derivation
from non-religious sources of authority, in law or any other domain until
later, modern, times in the Ottoman empire. In the realm of law, kanun—
which can mean both customary and imperial law, law that is normative
in large part because it is based on actual practice or practical needs—may
at first seem a secular counterbalance to sharia (Islamic jurisprudence and
religiously normative practice). And it was not unusual for official decrees
as well as pronouncements of ordinary people to cite kanun and sharia as
distinct legal authorities. But these terms were usually paired, as if twinned,
as in the following words allegedly spoken at the Aintab court by a tribal
elder who pledged bond for two youths accused of murder—“if I fail [to
guarantee their whereabouts], whatever is to be done to them according to
sharia and kanun shall be done to me.” (But were these words put into his
mouth by the state-salaried judge or the scribe who served him?)
What seems to be implied is that these two kinds of law interacted,
not that they were separate options. Kanun might suspend sharia provi-
sions in the interest of practicality (avoiding dire canonical penalties such
as stoning adulterers, imposing non-canonical forms of taxation, practicing
unsanctioned forms of slavery) and its practitioners might sometimes incur
the wrath of religious officials, but it always, if only by way of lip service,
recognized God’s law as a higher law. Tensions there were, but they rarely
ended up in overt challenges or division of competencies. What seems most
relevant to this comparative conversation is that the most concrete expres-
sion of the pairing of kanun and sharia is the existence a single system of
courts that were neither “secular” nor “religious,” but rather “all purpose.”
This was true until the nineteenth century, and arguably not even then. It
was in the one local court that the attempts of Süleyman I (r. 1520–1566)
2006 Book Forum: Leslie Peirce 199

and his legal advisers to regulate marriage by putting more control into
the hands of fathers and grandfathers—a cognate action, it would seem, to
what was happening in western Europe—were to be realized.
Perhaps, in my superficial knowledge of European legal practice, I am
setting up a contrast where nuances of difference may more appropriate,
especially in the sixteenth century that my book describes. But if the rise
of secular courts in western Europe is connected to the fact that women
appeared in courts as witnesses virtually as often as men (at least in the
courts studied by Hardwick)—with the outcome that they were “more ac-
tive architects” of values that could be legitimized by the courts than their
Ottoman sisters, who were barred for the most part from giving witness
in court—then the fact of a single system of courts with a distinct set of
procedural protocols may have worked to Ottoman women’s disadvantage.
On the other hand, except for criminal or state-administrative matters, Ot-
toman subjects had the option of seeking legal assistance and resolution of
disputes from religious authorities, be they priests, rabbis, or muftis and
imams. This “consumer option” left some legal discretion to individuals,
and also allowed some aspects of social life to escape legal scrutiny—for
instance, the autonomous world of women’s property that I described in
chapter 6 of the book.
The second issue I want to consider, raised by Chatterjee, is how my
work fits into a more global universe. To put this another way, is Chatterjee
justified in suggesting that I tend to address myself to a western audience
and put the Ottomans into dialogue with the rhythms and prevailing un-
derstandings of European history, but that my research may have more
linkages with the work of historians of Asia, especially historians of Mus-
lim polities and societies that share with the Ottomans the structures and
lived experiences of Islamic law, and that there is therefore much I could
learn from scholarship in these fields? All this is true. It is probably true
that my first book, which dealt with women and sovereignty among the
Ottomans, resonated more among historians of South Asia and China than
among historians of Europe, and this no doubt was because of the similar
intersections of rulership with the politics of gender in Asian polities, where
rulers had multiple wives as well as concubines. Even though I profited a
great deal in that book from studies of Asian polities, it is true that I was
attempting to engage a Europeanist audience, to persuade such an audi-
ence that the Ottomans should matter to them, and that this Eurasian and
Mediterranean empire cannot be relegated to an “other” history of an alien
“Middle East” (a label that is decidedly modern, western-Eurocentric, and
colonialist). I could safely assume that historians of Iran, South India, and
Inner Asia would “get” the arguments of that book, because of both the
Islamic and the Turko-Mongol political heritage shared by many of these
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regions, as well as the shared politics of reproduction mentioned above. I see

now that I wanted to have it both ways. In writing Morality Tales, persuad-
ing audiences was no longer an issue, since ten years later the Ottomans
seem to be on their way to occupying a place in academia commensurate
with their place in history. So I had the luxury of writing this book with no
agenda but the topic.
Nevertheless, it is true that I took as models for the micro-histori-
cal enterprise three classics of western European historiography. This is
admittedly a bias of my methodological inclinations, which are a product
of my training (I was an undergraduate European history major) and the
training of my teachers (however terrific they were at Islamic studies). It is
also probably a product of the phototropism of the academy, which, if only
because of the funding and staffing of history departments, still offers to an
Ottomanist more dialogue with the west than with the east. (There is more
“I” in these long paragraphs than there should be, since my experience may
well be a relatively common one.)
But there is more, I think, to the story of this Ottomanist’s European
drift than the bias of training or academic politics, and I thank Chatterjee
for pushing me to think publicly about this. The basic point is that the Ot-
toman experience cannot be adequately described as Asian, European, or
even Eurasian (the more accurate descriptor). It is all of these because of
its huge geographic and cultural compass, and yet as a synthetic, multi-
religious, and multi-ethnic polity it is not really any of these. The problem
with casting an east/Asian/not Christian vs. west/European/Christian
“either-or” polarity is that such a dichotomy obscures the prismatic range of
overlapping cultural-geographic zones. I am reminded of the map in Janet
Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350,
which scans Europe, Asia, and east Africa in eight overlapping “circuits”
of trade and contact. Western Europe overlaps with one other circuit, while
that circuit is a much larger one that encompasses Italy, eastern Europe, the
eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt down
to Cairo. It looks, of course, like the Roman empire minus Iberia, Gaul, and
Britain. The territories that were to make up the Ottoman empire are largely
contained in this circuit, although they also comprise part of two other cir-
cuits centered on the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. This is not to claim that
these circuits continue to define the world in early modern times—western
Europe has spawned other circuits spilling across the globe—but it gives
us a good idea of the center of gravity of the Ottoman empire, which did
not engage in overseas expansion, and of the cultures and territories that
circumscribed its frontiers. It is the mixing and matching of the rich set of
regional traditions and practices contained within Ottoman borders that
help us understand why Christian and Jewish women went to Ottoman
2006 Book Forum: Leslie Peirce 201

courts (only, it seems, when they could get a better deal there), and why
the empire’s chief mufti could declare that the standard of conduct for elite
women—not appearing in public except with a respectable retinue—was not
a dictate of Islam, as his petitioners understood it, because it was a shared
practice among Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women.
That the Ottomans looked west more than east, both consciously and
unconsciously, is no doubt an artifact of historical gravity. But there was
also a “push” westward. The late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tensions
and then wars of religion between sunni and shi`ite kept Iran, the Otto-
mans’ most important eastern neighbor and rival, from being the source
of cultural modelling that it had been for centuries. There was among the
Ottomans more vituperation of easterners and shi`ites than of westerners
(“franks”) and Christians. Mughal India was just too far away for its fasci-
nating religious and cultural experiments to affect the Ottomans with the
alacrity that Mediterranean currents did. This of course did not undermine
either the density of trade with Muslim societies to the east or the shared
devotion to sufism, Persian poetry, and the classics of the medieval Islamic
world from connecting the Ottoman world with its eastern neighbors. Sig-
nificant numbers of traders and intellectuals were oriented eastward, but
they may also have kept an eye on developments coming from the west.
The Ottomans were indeed Janus-faced.
The question of cultural translation between Muslims and non-Mus-
lims in Muslim-ruled empires (in the Ottoman case, Christians and Jews),
also raised by Chatterjee, is obviously relevant here. This question can also
help us understand comparative commonalities with the French and Italian
cases, as well as with the South Asian. It is definitely true that the dialogue
between zimmi (“protected” religious communities under Islamic rulership)
and Muslim is understudied in the Ottoman case, where we are pretty much
aware of the “what” of cultural accommodations and tensions but much less
so of the “how.” Chatterjee is absolutely right to suggest that the presence
of zimmis throughout Muslim-dominated space and time conditioned the
consolidation of Islamic law. I would stress that the conditioning was an
on-going process. The role of kanun (as imperial law) under the Ottomans
was to keep that process moving, to mediate between the practical realities
of governing a polyglot polity and the sometimes unworkable dictates of
religious law. Cultural translation had been going on at a broader level and
for millenia before the advent of Islam, at least in the eastern Mediterranean
and Near East. The region was a veritable melting pot of cultures, among
them Greek, Persian, Armenian, Roman (itself an amalgam), then Turkish.
An example of a new ingredient in early modern times was the immigra-
tion of Iberian Jews into the Ottoman domain after 1492, a date that struck
a blow to multi-cultural Spain.
202 Journal of Women’s History Spring

The tensions of cultural translation are amply reflected in the dialogue

between law and society. Just one example, an example of translation over
time: I was surprised recently to see that several statutes written into the
Ottoman legal constitution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were
nearly identical to provisions in the sixteenth-century BCE legal code of
the Anatolian Hittite empire, suggesting that the land itself had come to
enshrine customary practices. One of these shared statutes—honor killing,
that is, the right of a husband to execute his wife and her lover if caught
in flagrante delicto—was a practice that Ottoman law was unable to eradi-
cate, and so it attempted to mediate this vigilante practice by insisting the
husband call witnesses immediately (to testify to the evidence, that is, that
he had caught them in the act). Did this hesitant sanctioning by imperial
law of what was probably a regional practice, more tenacious among tribal
populations, “translate” into a broader acceptance of violence against
women in Ottoman society? I don’t know the answer, but it is a plausible
question to ask.
I want to end with the caution sounded by Hardwick, that Morality
Tales is a sunny book. Indeed, the moment I chose to study was a good mo-
ment for the empire (although not for all—it seems to have been tough on
the Turkmen of Aintab and probably on its small Armenian community).
The book is a snapshot of a small place and only one year in time. The Ot-
toman regime was then still engaged in the project of incorporating new
populations, that is, working actively on an assimilationist imperial project.
It had yet to encounter the economic difficulties, political factionalism, and
military stalemate that would challenge much of the rest of empire’s his-
tory. But it is arguable that until the violence of the empire’s unraveling in
the second half of the nineteenth century, the quality of local life was not
unduly affected by these currents, although of course different peoples in
the empire suffered from different circumstances at different moments in
time. One of the things that enabled Ottoman polity and society to keep
on muddling through was its system of courts. In the last thirty years or
so, much social, and especially gender, history in Ottoman studies has
been based on the voluminous collection of court records that survive. The
process of discovering women’s lives in the records (for there are virtually
no memoirs or letters we can turn to and very little writing by women
until the later nineteenth century) has been exciting and has perhaps led
us to underemphasize the difficulties in women’s legal lives. I have tried
to compensate, for example, by pointing out structural disadvantages to
women such as the difficulty of acting as witnesses. There remains much
work to be done.