The lawgiver and his lawmakers: The role of legal discourse in the change of Ottoman Imperial culture

My dissertation "The Lawgiver and His Lawmaker: The Role of Legal Discourse in the Change of Ottoman Imperial Culture" explores a selection of legal documents and treatises authored by Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-1566) and the most prominent jurist in his time: the seyhul'slam Ebu's-Su`ud. The thesis demonstrates how the legal discourse of the period ordered the imperial culture by developing the matrix on which both the Muslim community and society at large was recreated. Drawing on sources in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish that represent the legal discourse as well as on the literature that discusses the imperial order, I historicize how Islamic jurisprudence was employed in formulation of the ideology of "law and order" and "perfect justice" that Suleyman the Magnificent declared as hallmark of his rule, and the active role it played in Suleyman's project of remaking social, religious, and political structures.;The dynamics of the relationship between the science of determining God's law, positive law, and legal practice in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire is clearly one of mutual cognition. The cultural significance of the Islamic law (often implied in varied definitions emphasizing its all-embracing character, comprising regulations of all aspects of life of every Muslim) is revealed through a developed legal discourse (and discourse on law), the speech and action that determines and expresses the new Ottoman and Islamic identity. The Ottoman legal discourse of the period provides the most comprehensive representation of the political, social and cultural developments that mark the new age in the history of Islamdom.;Finally, the changes in the structure of the Ottoman socio-political organism as well as the changes of the imperial culture are best reflected through the ordered world of the Ottoman imperial archives that classified the diversity and unity of the composite society, and appropriated and perpetuated its legal practices.