Ottoman-era shari’a courts were only one of several parallel legal systems

Evidence

Egypt in the nineteenth century was formally part of the Ottoman empire but it possessed a large measure of political autonomy. Internal order in the Ottoman empire during the nineteenth century was maintained by a variety of institutions—the police, inspectors of markets, the ruler’s court of complaints, and so on. Shari¯‘a courts had primary jurisdiction over urban Muslims, rural tribes followed customary rules and procedures (‘urf ), and milliyya courts were regulated by and for the various sects of Christians and Jews. Hence shari¯‘a courts were by no means the only form of law administration. Indeed, the ruler had his own body of administrative law (qanu¯n) that did not draw its authority from the shari¯‘a. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 997

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the plural legal landscape — shari’a, ‘urf, milliyya, and qanun — that modern reform discourse flattened into a single ‘religious law’.
• XREF: Parallels legal-pluralism scholarship on how colonial and reforming states erase pre-existing jurisdictional layering — cf. Milgrom’s discussion of plural adjudicative institutions in medieval trade.