From Fiqh Matn to Code of State: Shifting Representation of the Multaqā from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries Ottoman World and Beyond

Abstract

Ibrāhīm al-Ḥalabī’s (d. 956/1549) Multaqā al-abḥur, published in 1517, quickly became one of the most authoritative fiqh texts in the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman authors treated it just as fiqh text. In their early writings, Western scholars also represented the book to their audiences as a fiqh book. However, by the late seventeenth century onward, Western authors started to portray the book as a code of the state in the modern sense of a uniform law. Some Muslim scholars in the late nineteenth century fallowed the same path. Thus, the representation of the Multaqā shifted from being a fiqh text to a code of the state. This article traces the historical process of this shift and argues that viewing the Multaqā as a code of the state was a misrepresentation that emerged under the influence of the notion of a modern nation-state.