Qānūn In the Ottoman context, q nūn (in Arabic, k nūn in Turkish) was a legal corpus that was associated with the Ottoman dynasty. More recently, from the nineteenth century onward (and perhaps even earlier), the term increasingly came to mean, in the Ottoman lands and beyond, state law and even international law. Because of its association with the Ottoman dynasty and, later, with states, q nūn is one of the most important markers of sovereignty in the Ottoman and the post-Ottoman Middle East (as well as in other parts of the contemporary Islamic world). Ottoman dynastic law was a set of edicts, regulations, and practices, parts of which were written down, codified, and promulgated in the form of codes (sing., k nūnn me). Other elements of Ottoman dynastic law, it appears, were not fully codified. Some of the edicts and legal codes were issued in the name of a specific sultan, while other practices and legal codes were labeled the “Ottoman q nūn” (k nūn-i Osm nī; or k nūnn me-i l-i Osm n). Certain aspects of Ottoman dynastic law, such as the promulgation of legal codes and edicts, can be seen as acts of positive law. At the same time, however, q nūn has the constitutional dimension of a reserved source of authority independent of whether it is used to issue legal codes or edicts. In the eighteenth century, for example, there was a decline in the number of legal codes issued, but this did not mean that the dynasty gave up on its right to issue those legal codes and to adhere to what its members perceived as its ancestral/dynastic practices and customs. Etymologically, the word q nūn is an Arabized version of the Greek word kanon, and it long predated the Ottomans. Nevertheless, its meaning in the pre-Ottoman period was different from the Ottoman understanding of the term. For instance, Mamlūk sources use the word q nūn to denote a principle, standard, or common practice, harking back to its Greek meaning of a standard of measurement. The fourteenth-century lexicographer Ibn Manẓūr (d. 1311/12) explains: “The q nūn of any thing is its manner and its scale.” Slightly later he adds: “The q nūns (qaw nīn) are the principles (uṣūl).” The early fourteenth-century encyclopedist A mad al-Nuwayrī (d. 1332?) gives an example in his statement that ignorance is more damaging than evil “because the principle of evil [q nūn al-sharr] is known, whereas the principle of ignorance [q nūn al-jahl] is not.” In several instances, Mamlūk authors used the term q nūn in the context of a political-administrative practice. For example, in his famous encyclopedic manual for scribes, alQalqashandī (d. 1418) mentions the “standards of chancery” (qaw nīn dīw n al-insh ). As these examples demonstrate, the Mamlūk q nūn, unlike the Ottoman q nūn, is not associated with a written legal code and carries no meaning of sultanic/dynastic law. Most precisely, the genealogy of Ottoman q nūn should be viewed through the lens of political culture as opposed to etymology. It is quite similar to other Mongol and post-Mongol dynastic laws. This similarity was acknowledged by Ottoman as well as other contemporary observers. Much like the Ottoman q nūn, the Chinggisid yasa (or yasağ) and the töre of the Timurid dynasty were in all likelihood a corpus of customs, rules, and administrative practices that were attributed to the eponymous ancestors of the dynasty (Chinggis Khan and Timur, respectively). Although these legal corpora changed over the centuries, their descendants continued to draw legitimacy by referring to the charismatic authority of an ancestor as legislator. Similarly, members of the Ottoman dynasty as well as many of its servants and subjects often stressed the ancestral origin of the Ottoman q nūn. For instance, the preamble to the Ottoman 1525 legal code (k nūnn me) for the province of Egypt, which was issued by the Ottoman sultan Sulaymān the Lawgiver (K nūnī), describes the sultan’s ancestors and the Ottoman dynasty more generally as the source of the q nūn and of the Egyptian legal code in particular: “Some of the just and compassionate q nūns, which [were initially issued] in ancient times and [came down] from my [Sulaymān’s] noble fathers and great grandfathers, are linked [to] an old principle and in a straight link, and should be followed.” It is for this reason that Ottoman dynastic law is occasionally described as an Ottoman custom, ʿurf, as the term ehl-i örf (which was used to denote Ottoman state authorities) and the title of Sultan Mehmet II’s legal code (ber mücib-i örf-i Osm nī) imply. In the Ottoman Empire, q nūn served as a marker of the Ottoman dynasty’s sovereignty. It is for this reason that the Ottoman conquest of a territory was accompanied by the promulgation of a legal code (k nūnn me) and the abrogation, real or nominal, of the pre-Ottoman dynastic laws. The term q nūn retained this connection with sovereignty even when the dynasty ceased to play important political and legal role, as was the case, for example, in polities where the ruling dynasty did not play an important legal/constitutional role. As one of the main sites of sovereignty and as a legitimizing discourse, q nūn was an important means through which the ruling dynasties and the ruling elites in the late Ottoman and the post-Ottoman periods regulated and delineated the boundaries of other, both Islamic and non-Islamic, legal discourses and spheres. As far as Islamic law is concerned, the notion of q nūn legitimized the Ottoman dynasty’s development of a learned hierarchy that played an instrumental role in shaping the doctrines and the structure of a specific branch within the anafī school of law which the Ottomans adopted as its official school of law. Ottoman authors, their contemporaries from other parts of the eastern Islamic lands, and modern scholars have debated and written quite extensively about the relationship between dynastic and Islamic law. While some argued that q nūn was fully compatible or harmonized with the Sharīʿah, others emphasized the tensions between those legal discourses and stressed the non-Islamic nature of q nūn. From an institutional point of view, however, most scholars and commentators have not paid attention to the institutional relationship between q nūn and various legal discourses, including Islamic law. As has been suggested, institutionally speaking, q nūn shaped the structure of the branch of the anafī madhhab and in general served to delineate the latter’s sphere of influence. To a large extent, this relationship between q nūn and Islamic legal discourse persisted after the decline in the predominance of the dynasty as the cornerstone of the political and legal order in the empire and, after the empire’s demise, in the nationstates that were founded in its former territories. Over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, q nūn came to denote state law in general. Similarly, Europeans also referred to their laws as q nūn when they were addressing the Arabic and Turkish-speaking populations of the Middle East (although some Ottoman writers, such as seventeenth-century İbrahim Peçevi, had made this comparison earlier). In the 1866 translation of the Napoleonic legal code the term “French civil law” was translated as “the French civil q nūn” (al-q nūn al-farans wī al-madanī). In so doing, the translators adhered to the Ottoman understanding of q nūn as a legal site of sovereignty. Since the nineteenth century, q nūn came to be one of the most common terms in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (and other Islamicate languages), to denote state law, regardless of the sovereign’s identity and the political structure of the state (monarchy, republic, Islamic republic, etc.). Moreover, q nūn is also employed to refer to international legislation (al-q nūn al-duwalī). The long history of q nūn from the post-Mongol and the Ottoman periods to the twenty-first century reveals the conceptual innovation that the notion of q nūn captures. 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