Guy Burak
New York University, Libraries, Department Member
- Harvard University, Harvard Law School, Post-DocNew York University, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Alumnusadd
- History, Ottoman History, Islamic Law, Historical Anthropology, Islamic History, Manuscript Studies, and 31 moreCentral Asian Studies, Early modern Ottoman History, Mamluk Studies, Mughal History, Canon Formation, Ottoman manuscript cultures, Early modern Islamic History, Ottoman Turkish historical writing, Mongol, Turco-Iranian World, Ottoman Anatolia (1200-1500) Comparative empire, Medieval Islamic, post-Mongol, Frontier, Mongol world empire Seljuk, political culture Persian, Arabic Manuscripts, Digital Humanities, Library Science, Library and Information Science, Archives, Digital Archives, Gujarat, Mecca, Medina, Arabic OCR, Middle Eastern photography, The history of the Ottoman book and printing, North African History, Commentaries: History and Theory, and Sufismedit
The Second Formation of Islamic Law is the first book to deal with the rise of an official school of law in the post-Mongol period. The author explores how the Ottoman dynasty shaped the structure and doctrine of a particular branch... more
The Second Formation of Islamic Law is the first book to deal with the rise of an official school of law in the post-Mongol period. The author explores how the Ottoman dynasty shaped the structure and doctrine of a particular branch within the Hanafi school of law. In addition, the book examines the opposition of various jurists, mostly from the empire's Arab provinces, to this development. By looking at the emergence of the concept of an official school of law, the book seeks to call into question the grand narratives of Islamic legal history that tend to see the nineteenth century as the major rupture. Instead, an argument is formed that some of the supposedly nineteenth-century developments, such as the codification of Islamic law, are rooted in much earlier centuries. In so doing, the book offers a new periodization of Islamic legal history in the eastern Islamic lands.
A clarification concerning manuscript pagination in the book:
Since I started working on this project, I have used manuscripts and copies of manuscripts in different forms and formats. Most manuscripts I have used were digitized copies of manuscripts from the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul. Since the basic unit was a digital image of the open manuscript (capturing two pages) rather than a folio in the codex, I decided to use the page number that appears on the left hand-side page and the terms Recto and Verso to refer to the right and left page of the digital image, respectively. I use this pagination practice consistently throughout the book.
A clarification concerning manuscript pagination in the book:
Since I started working on this project, I have used manuscripts and copies of manuscripts in different forms and formats. Most manuscripts I have used were digitized copies of manuscripts from the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul. Since the basic unit was a digital image of the open manuscript (capturing two pages) rather than a folio in the codex, I decided to use the page number that appears on the left hand-side page and the terms Recto and Verso to refer to the right and left page of the digital image, respectively. I use this pagination practice consistently throughout the book.
Research Interests: Ottoman History, Central Asian Studies, Ottoman Studies, Mughal History, Islamic Studies, and 12 moreOttoman Empire, Central Asian History (Area Studies), Central Asia, Islam and Sufism in South Asia, Hanafism, Muftis, Madhhab, Islamic law and jurisprudence, Medieval Islamic and Turco-Iranian world, Mongol world empire, Seljuk, Mongol, post-Mongol, and Ottoman Anatolia (1200-1500), Comparative empire, frontier, and political culture, and Persian and Ottoman Turkish historical writing
Published by مركز نماء للبحوث والدراسات
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This study looks at the history of two madrasas in Jerusalem, al-Madrasa al-ʿUthmaniyya and al-Madrasa al-Fanariyya from the 15th to the 18th centuries, in order to examine an understudied Ottoman institution: the imperial provincial... more
This study looks at the history of two madrasas in Jerusalem, al-Madrasa al-ʿUthmaniyya and al-Madrasa al-Fanariyya from the 15th to the 18th centuries, in order to examine an understudied Ottoman institution: the imperial provincial madrasa. The imperial madrasas were assigned to the state-appointed Hanafi muftis of different localities across the empire. This essay argues that these learning institutions helped to consolidate the connection between the Ottoman dynasty, its appointed jurisconsults, and its broader imperial learned hierarchy. Beyond revealing some of its important institutional aspects, examining the imperial provincial madrasa casts light on the doctrinal role the Ottoman dynasty assumed in regulating the content of Hanafi jurisprudence that members of the imperial learned hierarchy were to apply. This role and the connections between the dynasty and its appointed jurisconsults had important effects within the diverse legal landscape of the empire, where multiple Sunni (especially Hanafi) legal and scholarly traditions coexisted. In further analyzing the identity of the endowers of these imperial madrasas, the article opens up new avenues for exploring how the Ottoman dynasty was defined in different contexts.
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The article explores the understudied theological-legal concept and practice of renewal of faith, an Ottoman innovation dating from the fifteenth century. It situates this practice within the context of the Ottoman and, more broadly,... more
The article explores the understudied theological-legal concept and practice of renewal of faith, an Ottoman innovation dating from the fifteenth century. It situates this practice within the context of the Ottoman and, more broadly, Mediterranean ‘age of confessionalization’, an age in which rulers and dynasts across the Mediterranean infused ‘religious rhetoric into the processes of state and social formation’. This study focuses on the legal aspects of the Ottoman confessionalization project. It reconstructs the debate between various jurists concerning the practice of renewal of faith, and argues that this debate illustrates the multiple sites within the empire in which notions such as faith, ‘orthodoxy’, and unbelief were negotiated and articulated.
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This article proposes a comparative analytical framework to study changes in Islamic law during the post-Mongol period, particularly the rise of the official school of law (or state madhhab). Taking as my case study the Ottoman adoption... more
This article proposes a comparative analytical framework to study changes in Islamic law during the post-Mongol period, particularly the rise of the official school of law (or state madhhab). Taking as my case study the Ottoman adoption of a particular branch within the Sunni Hanafi school of law, I suggest that this adoption marks a new chapter in Islamic legal history. In earlier periods, while rulers appointed judges and thus regulated the adjudication procedures, they did not intervene, at least theoretically, in the structure and doctrine of the schools of law, which remained the relatively autonomous realm of the jurists. The Ottoman adoption of the school, by contrast, was not merely an act of state patronage, since the dynasty played an important role in regulating the school's structure and doctrine. To this end, it employed a set of administrative and institutional practices, such as the development of an imperial learned hierarchy with standardized career and training tracks and the appointment of jurisconsults (muftis). Some of these practices were found in other polities across the eastern Islamic lands in the post-Mongol period, but these similarities have not been treated comparatively in modern historiography. They suggest that the Ottoman case was part of a broader legal culture that spanned several polities across the region. This article outlines a framework that will enable historians of Islamic law to treat these similarities in a more coherent manner. The framework raises key issues in the historiography of Islamic law and its nineteenth-century modernization.
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In Dror Ze'evi and Ehud R. Toledano (eds.), Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East: “Modernities” in the Making (De Gruyter, 2015)
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The article traces the Ottoman introduction of ḳānūn to the Arabic-speaking Middle East in the first decades following the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands in 1516–17. In particular, it looks at two supplementary discourses that... more
The article traces the Ottoman introduction of ḳānūn to the Arabic-speaking Middle East in the first decades following the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands in 1516–17. In particular, it looks at two supplementary discourses that accompanied the conquest: (1) the Ottoman attempt to invent a Mamluk ḳānūn, despite the fact that the concept was alien to the Mamluk political-legal vocabulary, and (2) the denunciation of the Ottoman ḳānūn as yasa by jurists from the Arab lands. By examining these discourses, the article draws attention to some particular features of Ottoman dynastic law and points to the difference between the Ottoman dynastic law and other forms of sultanic legislation, namely siyāsa.
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in Anthony Grafton and Glenn Most (eds.), Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 14-33.
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The article reconstructs a debate between Hanafi jurists who operated throughout Ottoman Greater Syria (and beyond) from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries concerning the evidentiary status of the Ottoman imperial registers... more
The article reconstructs a debate between Hanafi jurists who operated throughout Ottoman Greater Syria (and beyond) from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries concerning the evidentiary status of the Ottoman imperial registers (defters). At the centre of the jurists’ debate is the permissibility of using imperial registers as independent, uncorroborated evidence. It was a debate about who had the right to regulate and determine what constituted an authentic evidential document: while some jurists argued that it was almost exclusively the privilege of the jurists, others were willing to concede this authority, at least in part, to the Ottoman dynasty and its bureaucracy. Furthermore, the article contends that the debate about the evidentiary validity of the defters captures the complex relationship between Ottoman dynastic law and the Hanafi fiqh discourse. Finally, the debate sheds light on the legal “defterization” of other types of documents and texts, such as a chronicle (taʾrīkh) and court records (sijill).
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In 1543, a quarter century after the Ottoman conquest of the Holy Cities, the Meccan jurist, hadith scholar, and chronicler Jar Allah Muhammad Ibn Fahd (d. 1547) completed a short work devoted to the construction projects undertaken in... more
In 1543, a quarter century after the Ottoman conquest of the Holy Cities, the Meccan jurist, hadith scholar, and chronicler Jar Allah Muhammad Ibn Fahd (d. 1547) completed a short work devoted to the construction projects undertaken in the city by the Ottoman sultans Selim I (r. 1512–20) and his son Süleyman (r. 1520–66). The work is highly unusual from the perspective of the Arabic historiographical tradition and constitutes the first comprehensive response by an Arab chronicler to the emergence of an Ottoman imperial architectural idiom around the turn of the sixteenth century. The article situates Ibn Fahd and his work in three interrelated contexts: (a) the incorporation of Mecca and Medina into the Ottoman domains; (b) the emergence of an Ottoman architectural idiom and visual interest in the description of the Holy Sanctuaries across the Indian Ocean, from Istanbul to Gujarat; and (c) the competition between the new Custodians of the Two Holy Sanctuaries and other Islamic rulers, past and present. In particular, the article focuses on the challenges posed by the sultans of Gujarat, who were also quite interested in the Holy Sanctuaries. This interest is captured in Muhyi al-Din Lari’s (d. 1526–27) description of the pilgrimage and the Haramayn, which was written for the Gujarati sultan Muzaffar Shah II (r. 1511–26).
Research Interests: Ottoman History, Pilgrimage, Ottoman Studies, Islamic Art, Islamic Studies, and 10 moreIslamic manuscripts illumination, Arabic Historiography (History), Gujarat, Islamic Manuscripts, Mecca, Islamic art and architecture, Islamic Historiography, History of Persian art and architecture, Hajj Pilgrims, and Persian Historiography
The article examines multiple approaches to archived documents and documentary depositories in the Ottoman Empire. By exploring a range of views that reflect a sense of archival consciousness among different groups and individuals... more
The article examines multiple approaches to archived documents and documentary depositories in the Ottoman Empire. By exploring a range of views that reflect a sense of archival consciousness among different groups and individuals throughout the Ottoman lands, the essay seeks to better contextualize the Ottoman quite successful attempts to regulate the imperial paper trail and to promote a specific view of the archive. More generally, by tracing the emergence of a particular form of archival consciousness among members of the imperial administrative and judicial elites as well as Ottoman subjects, the article intends to offer a framework for a comparative study of the archival practices throughout the eastern Islamic lands.
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The article examines the efforts of Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī (d. 1605) and his readers in the Ottoman domains to reconstruct an authoritative version of Muḥammad b. Sulaymān b. Abī Bakr al-Jazūlī's (d. 1465) Dalā'il al-khayrāt. In his... more
The article examines the efforts of Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī (d. 1605) and his readers in the Ottoman domains to reconstruct an authoritative version of Muḥammad b. Sulaymān b. Abī Bakr al-Jazūlī's (d. 1465) Dalā'il al-khayrāt. In his commentary on the Dalā'il, al-Fāsī recorded his collation of multiple versions of al-Jazūlī's work. The commentary and its contribution to a notion of an authoritative and authorial version of Dalā'il al-khayrāt accompanied al-Jazūlī's text in its journey to the eastern parts of the Islamic world and helped readers there bridge a two-century gap in the transmission of the work. The article studies the manners in which Ottoman readers/reciters of Dalā'il used al-Fāsī's commentary to create a channel to al-Jazūlī and the divine. In so doing, the article seeks to draw attention to additional functions of the genre of the commentary in the Islamic tradition. Moreover, by focusing on the textual practices of al-Fāsī and his Ottoman readers, the essay argues that the act of collation of the multiple versions of Dalā'il al-khayrāt was in and of itself an ethical act of devotion that manifested the readers'/reciters' quest for proximity to al-Jazūlī.
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The article examines the rise of standardized collections of fatāwā issued by officially appointed provincial Hanafi muftis across the Ottoman Empire in the long eighteenth century. The article focuses on the earliest compilation, that of... more
The article examines the rise of standardized collections of fatāwā issued by officially appointed provincial Hanafi muftis across the Ottoman Empire in the long eighteenth century. The article focuses on the earliest compilation, that of the Jerusalemite Ḥanafī mufti, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Abī al-Luṭf. This compilation was commissioned by the famous chief imperial mufti Feyzullah Efendi. The article then traces the proliferation of the standardized fatāwā compilation over the course of the eighteenth century, from Medina to the Balkans. This essay seeks to examine the emergence of local/provincial compilations of fatāwā over the eighteenth century as yet another chapter in the long intervention of the Ottoman dynasty (through its learned hierarchy) in the regulation of the doctrines of the Ḥanafī madhhab at the imperial and provincial levels. Focusing on Feyzullah Efendi's initiative and its aftermath may cast light on specific venues and practices in which this intervention took place in a particular historical moment.
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This essay is an attempt to read the section on invocations, prayers, the unique qualities of the Quran and magic squares of the palace library of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (d. 918/1512) along with several works by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān... more
This essay is an attempt to read the section on invocations, prayers, the unique qualities of the Quran and magic squares of the palace library of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (d. 918/1512) along with several works by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. c. 858/1454 or 1455) to cast light on underexamined perceptions of calligraphic styles and alphabets/scripts employed to inscribe talismanic objects and manuscripts. Methodologically, the intention is to situate the inventory of the palace library in the intersection of prescriptive texts, on the one hand, and talismanic objects and manuscripts of invocations, on the other. By taking the inventory as a document of practice, the essay seeks to illustrate the importance of paying attention to other elements of the talismanic compound in general, and to the use of alphabets/scripts with their specific talismanic attributes in particular.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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This essay addresses the revival of culturalist assumptions in historical archival studies and suggests an alternative framework. Rather than provenance, it privileges textual circulation; rather than civilizational divides between... more
This essay addresses the revival of culturalist assumptions in historical archival studies and suggests an alternative framework. Rather than provenance, it privileges textual circulation; rather than civilizational divides between supposedly distinct “European” and “Islamic” archivalities, it highlights mutability and commensurability as defining elements of a broadly shared, if inherently dynamic, internally complex, and transactionally defined early modern archivality. We first show how the historiography on early modern archives has inadvertently perpetuated a myopic Eurocentric view of the centralized archive as a key aspect of European archivality. We analyze how the construct “Islamic archivality,” when proffered as a comparative counterpoint to such European archivality, not only promotes an outdated understanding of “Islam” (and, indeed “Europe”) as a discrete, transhistorical phenomenon, but rests on a limited set of mostly pre-Ottoman, medieval examples. By positing “Islam” as fundamentally premodern, this historiography sidesteps significant shared late antique genealogies of textual practices and mobilities across a vast early modern region that traverses modern continental/civilizational configurations. In lieu of the prevalent comparative mode, which juxtaposes civilizational blocs and then selectively contrasts specific archival institutions and practices, we suggest concentrating on intersections and circulations of documents and practices across ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Drawing on examples from our research in Ottoman diplomatic archives, we challenge scholars of early modern archivality to move beyond fixed notions of “European,” and “non-European,” “centralized” and “decentralized” archives, and “original” and “copy,” as primary indices of comparison, and attend to the social life of documents and their mutability through circulation.
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In Ali Emre Özyıldırım, Hanife Koncu, Hatice Aynur, Müjgan Çakır, and Selim S. Kuru (eds.), Eski Metinlere Yeni Bağlamlar - Osmanlı Edebiyatı Çalışmalarında Yeni Yönelimler (Eski Türk Edebiyatı Çalışmaları X) (Istanbul: Klasik Yayınları,... more
In Ali Emre Özyıldırım, Hanife Koncu, Hatice Aynur, Müjgan Çakır, and Selim S. Kuru (eds.), Eski Metinlere Yeni Bağlamlar - Osmanlı Edebiyatı Çalışmalarında Yeni Yönelimler (Eski Türk Edebiyatı Çalışmaları X) (Istanbul: Klasik Yayınları, 2015), 96-117. Translated by Bahadir Surelli.
Erratum: p. 104 f.n. 12 should be: Amalia Levanoni, "A Supplementary Source for the Study of Mamluk Social History: The Taqārīẓ," Arabica 60 (1-2) (2013): 146 – 177.
Erratum: p. 104 f.n. 12 should be: Amalia Levanoni, "A Supplementary Source for the Study of Mamluk Social History: The Taqārīẓ," Arabica 60 (1-2) (2013): 146 – 177.
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A slightly revised English version of "Sansür, kanonizasyon ve Osmanlı imza-takriz pratikleri üzerine düşünceler"
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in Khaled Abou El Fadl , Ahmad Atif Ahmad and Said Fares Hassan (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Islamic Law (Routledge, 2019)
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Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar and Cornell H. Fleischer (eds.), Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4) (2 vols) (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 341–366.
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Burak, G. . "Mufti." In The [Oxford] Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t349/e0095 (accessed 01-Nov-2017).
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Burak, G. . "Madhhab." In The [Oxford] Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t349/e0094 (accessed 01-Nov-2017).
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Burak, G. . "Documents." In The [Oxford] Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t349/e0121 (accessed 01-Nov-2017).
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Burak, G. . "Qānūn." In The [Oxford] Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t349/e0157 (accessed 01-Nov-2017).
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Encyclopedia of Islam, 3rd Edition
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Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2(2) (2015): 427-429.
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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 81(2) (2018): 352-53.
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Research Interests: Ottoman History, Safavids (Islamic History), Islamic art and architecture, post-Mongol, Islamic shrines, and 4 moreMedieval Islamic and Turco-Iranian world, Mongol world empire, Seljuk, Mongol, post-Mongol, and Ottoman Anatolia (1200-1500), Comparative empire, frontier, and political culture, and Persian and Ottoman Turkish historical writing
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M'hamed Oualdi, Ismail Warscheid, Guy Burak and Paolo Sartori, A proposito di «visions of justice» di Paolo Sartori, 527-560,
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14-17 January, 2022
The sessions will take place online. Register in advance:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrcO6uqzIpHdcJJOA1FsDBx6VhXbgQjXqd
The sessions will take place online. Register in advance:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrcO6uqzIpHdcJJOA1FsDBx6VhXbgQjXqd