The Sultan's Servants the Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550-1650

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The Sultan's Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550-1650 by. Metin KuntReview by: Bruce MastersJournal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Jul., 1988), pp. 226-228Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/544985 .

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226 JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERNSTUDIES VOL. 47 No. 3Marchands d'htoffes du Fayyoum au III/IXsiecle d'apres leurs archives (actes et lettres).Vol. 1. Les Actes des Banu cAbd al-Mu'min.Vol. 2. La Correspondanceadministrativeetprivie des Banu SAbdal-Mu'min. By YusuFRAGIB.Supplements aux Annales islamo-logiques, cahiers nos. 2 and 5. Cairo: Institut

Franqais d'Archeologie Orientale, 1982 and1985. Vol. 1, pp. xxi + 47 + 13 pls.; Vol. 2,pp. vi + 106 + 37 pls.Although many Arabic papyri have beenpublished--not a fewof themfrom the Fayyim--most are isolated documents: letters withoutreplies, contracts between persons otherwiseunknown to us, etc. The late Jean David-Weillfirst called scholarly attention to a number ofpapyri of the third century A.H. in the Louvrethat formed part of a coherent group of relateddocuments, but his untimely death preventedhim from carrying out his plan to publishthem. Fortunately, this work has been under-taken by Yisuf Ragib, who presents fifty-fourof these documents in the two volumes underreview.The remainingLouvredocuments identi-fiedby David-Weill, plus many additional onesbelonging to the same archive that Ragib haslocated in the collections at Paris, London,Berlin, and Vienna, will appear in four furthervolumes.The twelve documents publishedin vol. 1aremostly contracts of sale (nos. 2-10) but alsoinclude a contract of partnership (no. 1), amarriage contract (no. 11), and a waqfdocu-ment (no. 12), all forming part of the personalcorrespondence and records of the merchantand notary Abi Hurayra Jacfar ibn Ahmadibn CAbd l-Mu'min. The forty-two documentspublished in vol. 2 include one petitionaddressed by AbUiHurayra to an unknownauthority requesting him to intercede againstsome partieswho had molested his brother(no.29); a large number of letters to or from AbUiHurayra or his close relatives (nos. 1-28,30-38); and four lettersof unknown correspon-dents, included here because they were writtenon the back of other documents published inthe volume.Each document is given in edited form withtranslation and a photo of the original in theplates, and accompanied by a brief analysis of

content and notes on the readings proposed.Although only very close scrutiny of the textsand the proposed solutions can provide a finaljudgment on the accuracy of the renditionsoffered, a few quick probes convince me thatthe editor has largely succeeded in meeting thechallenge of providing an accurate reading.The difficulty of preparing such papyri prop-erly will be well known to anyone who has evertried to work with them, and we must begrateful to Yisuf Ragib for having taken onthis arduous task. When the series is complete,it will be comparable in importance only tosome of the groups of documents from theCairo Geniza, perhaps, as a source of informa-tion about the social and economic life ofmedieval Egypt. Already the papyri edited inthese two volumes begin to give us a sense forwhat the life and affairs of one family ofMuslim merchants was really like, and weeagerly await the appearance of the remainingfour volumes.FRED M. DONNER

TheUniversityf Chicago

The Sultan's Servants: The Transformationof Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550-1650. By i. METINKUNT.New York: Colum-bia University Press, 1983. Pp. xxiii + 181.$32.50.Prosopography has proven itself a usefulmeans to approach the institutional and social

history of societies and classes for whose mem-bers extensive biographical information is ei-ther no longer extant or was never kept. As anhistoriographical device it has seen its mostextensive application in the fields of preindus-trial European and North American history,but it has also been used with success byOttomanists such as N. Itzkowitz, C. Findley,J. Shinder, and M. Zilfi. These studies have forthe most part, however, been confined to thecivil/ militaryand religiousbureaucracies in theeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, aperiod for which a wealth of documentationremains.

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JULY 1988 BOOK REVIEWS 227In The Sultan's Servants, 1. Metin Kunt

employs a similar methodology to examine anearlier and less well documented, if no lesscritical, period of change for the Empire to seeif collective biography might provide furtherclues to the process by which the basic unitof Ottoman provincial government was trans-formed from the sancak (district) to the eyalet(province). The manifestations of the crisis ex-periencedby the Ottomans in the years between1550 and 1650 are well documented and havebeen studied elsewhere. What is new in thiswork is the analysis of how the tensions of theperiod affected the makeup of the Empire'stopprovincial bureaucracy.To accomplish this, Metin Kunt isolates theindividuals who held the district governorshipsin seven provinces for three periods chosenrandomly from throughout the century to cre-ate a representative sample. The provinces aredivided further into core and frontier prov-inces, and while it might be arguedthat Aleppo(Halep) was not truly on the frontier, the dis-tinction between the two categories seems welltaken, since Ottoman administration in theborder regions often incorporated local talentto a degree not found in the center. Havingidentified these individuals, the author exam-ines their career backgrounds, term of office,the time spent waiting between appointments,and the extent to which they were appointed topositions in the same region, a process he seesas being a conscious effort to produce areaspecialists. The resulting pattern he uncovers isat once convincing and interesting,for it demon-strates a narrowing of careeropportunities as alarger pool of candidates became available forhigher office. This was accompanied by an in-crease in the time, and most probably themoney, required to obtain an appointment, aswell as the growing importance attached to thehouseholds from which the candidates came.Besides this vision of a bureaucracy withcrumbling standards beset by nepotism andgreed which seems to confirm the receivedinterpretation that something went dreadfullywrong in the Ottoman Empireat the end of thesixteenth century, an important contributionof this work lies in its clarification of the termkul. Literally"slave,"Kunt shows that its mean-

ing was closer to "servant"or even "subject."The implication of this is to call into questionmuch of what has been written about the roleof slaves in Ottoman government, in particular,and in various other Muslim states, in general.A further service the author provides to allstudents of Ottoman history is his very clearexplanations of the Ottoman terms dirlik andhas and his linking of the decline in the dirliksystem to the transformation of the provincialadministration.The only real problems with the author'soverall thesis, unfortunately, comes in his con-clusion. There he states that the decline of thedirlik system could perhaps be considered aprocess of "modernization" in that it was ashift away from "feudalism." Even though heputs both terms in quotes, the assertion is con-fusing, since he states in the next paragraphthat the dirlik system was not comparable tofeudalism. The contradiction lies in his linkingthe transition from feudal to modern to agreatermonetarization of the economy and notto changes in the control of land, i.e., the rise ofthe giftlik system and the relationship betweenthe provincial leadershipand the center.Another generalized, undocumented conclu-sion occurs in the last paragraph where hestates,Capitalaccumulationwaslargely ntended or poli-tical aims, ratherthan for economicinvestments.This,more hananything lse,determinedhefuturecourseof Ottoman ivalrywithEuropeatthe thresh-oldof the industrial evolution nd edto a declineofOttoman ortunesrelativeo the increasingmightofan industrializedand imperialisticEuropein thenineteenthentury.This might have been more convincing had hedemonstrated an inclination on the part of theUmerato invest in productionbefore the transi-tion. The example of the entrepreneurialDervigMehmed Papa is interesting, but his careercomes toward the end of the period beingstudied, and, standing alone, does not docu-ment a trend in any direction.This work is an English translation and re-vision of an earlier Turkish edition entitledSancaktan Eyalete, published by Bogazigi Uni-versity in 1978. As the author states in his



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228 JOURNALOF NEAR EASTERNSTUDIES VOL. 47 No. 3introduction to the English edition, it containsa more general introduction to the subject thanis found in Turkish. Furthermore, the lists ofsancaks in the Turkishversion have been elimi-nated and parts of the text have been relegatedto appendixes in English. On the whole, thedifference between the two is minimal, how-ever. Whether in Turkish or English, this workis a welcome addition to the growing body ofwork on Ottoman institutional history for itsuse of the methodology of prosopography, itsclarification of various Ottoman institutions,and the insights it provides into the very trou-bled period for the Ottomans at the end of thesixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenthcenturies.

BRUCEMASTERSWesleyanUniversity

On Schacht's Origins of Muhammadan Juris-prudence. By G. M. AZAMI.Riyadh: KingSaud University and London: John Wileyand Sons, Inc., 1985. Pp. 236.Joseph Schacht's views both on the authen-ticity of hadTthin general and as the basis ofIslamic law in particular are well known. Anintense controversy has raged over both theseviews among Western scholars of Islam andamong Muslims as well. The Western critics ofSchacht, although they do not accept hissweeping conclusions, have, nevertheless, beeninfluenced by his views to some extent. Itshould be pointed out that modern, systematicanalysisof hadith began with Ignaz Goldziher'sMuhammadanische Studien, vol. 2, althoughSchacht applied that analysis specificallyto thelegal hadith materials and in much greaterdetail and added his main finding that isnads,or transmission chains, were projected back-wards to the Prophet from the two succeedinggenerations.The evaluations of Schacht's work so far,however, have been only very general. In myIslam (chap. 3), I analyzed Schacht's positionsin considerable detail and subjected them to asevere criticism; nevertheless, my critique re-

mained at a theoretical level, and I did notwork with actual hadith materials. It is for thefirst time that we have work like Azami's; hehas devoted literally years of research to theinvestigationof hadith and has analyzed,tested,and passed scholarly judgment on Schacht'sargument step by step, working with actualhadith materials. This book is, indeed, aneffective response to Schacht.The catalogue of issues where Azami hasfound fault with Schacht's treatment of casesof various traditions, his oversights, his mis-interpretations,etc., is so long (in fact, Azami'swhole work is full of these examples) that onlya few examples can be dealt with in a review.Infact, I will cite only two here. On pages 86 and87, Azami quotes Schacht who says, "TheIraqian thesis of the over-riding authority oftraditions from the Prophet is definitely rele-gated to a subordinate place by the importancewhich the Iraqians attach, in theory and prac-tice, to traditions from Companions. We findthis principle explicitly formulated in manyplaces, for instance, Tr. I, 89." This statementclearly indicates that Iraqi jurists attachedmuch greaterimportanceto traditionsfrom theCompanions than those from the Prophethimself. But Azami then quotes the originaltext 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 relativeworth, for the Iraqis, of traditions from theProphet and those from the Companions butsimply states that Iraqis claim that they neveroppose (any opinion) of the Companions. Al-Shafici, however, goes on to accuse the Iraqisof having opposed the opinion of the CaliphcUmar in a certain case.I shall draw the second example from a largenumber of problematic cases discussed bySchacht where he seeks to prove that traditionsarose in the period that elapsed betweencertainnarrators-where the earlier authority doesnot quote a certain hadith which he may beexpected to quote but the later authorityquotes it. In Islam, I praised this approach tothe critique of hadith but warned that it has tobe wielded carefully, for it is possible that if thetime span between the two authorities is notvery big, it may be rash to judge the tradition


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