Ottoman legal reform replaced oral testimony and remade the Muslim subject

Evidence

These policies that changed the structure and face of Ottoman societies were part of a series of major acts toward the end of the nineteenth century that aimed at a further consolidation of the Ottoman state’s legal and thus sovereign powers. A Ministry of Justice, which was to bring under its wings the Shariʿa and the European-style Nizamiyya courts, was established in 1879, thus not only unifying a hitherto fairly heterogonous system but also having the latter absorb the former. … The courts were also instructed to expand their documentary range and to refuse orality as standard procedural evidence. By this point, oral testimony and the traditional procedural laws that were predicated on it became largely obsolete, producing serious effects on conceptions of personal integrity, trust, moral standing in society, and much else. Through these and similar displacements, the subject was given a new formation, a new epistemology for living and for dealing with social others. The Muslim subject was being steadily transplanted out of a technology of care of the self and its inner psychological operations into an internally disciplined but externally formed citizen. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s discipline/surveillance theme already in the book, and to the broader ‘colonized subject’ argument.
• ADDENDUM: The displacement of oral testimony for documentary evidence in Ottoman courts parallels themes in my noise/silence work about how epistemic regimes privilege certain modes of evidence.