The Historicization of Sharia and Historical Generalization

This review essay seeks to offer an analytic/historiographical framework that would pay closer attention to the imperial legal landscape and the Hanafi jurisprudential tradition. This framework, I believe, adds to the continuum that Beshara B. Doumani proposes, which is based on the political economy of different localities across the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean and, perhaps, well beyond. Taken together, both aspects of the framework reveal the complexity of the Ottoman legal landscape. They also suggest new directions in which Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean could be generalized while retaining the rich local dimension of the work.