Basak Tug

Despite the fact the association of sexuality with honour was not a novel phenomenon for Ottoman society, the “violation of honour” (hetk-i ‘ırz) is one of the most frequently encountered concepts in eighteenth-century Ottoman legal documents. The recurring presence of this concept in official correspondence, especially between the central power and Ottoman subjects, represents the development of new parameters concerning relations between the early-modern state and its subjects, as expressed in moral terms. The Ottoman central government’s claim to protect the honour of its subjects reflects a dialogic process in which subjects started to use new types of legal terminology to request the intervention of the state in local matters that threatened their well-being.

The present project argues that such a relationship or claim over honour began to establish a state-society relationship based on citizenship rights over the protection of life, honour and property well before the so-called reform era, which as most scholars maintain, began with the Tanzimat Edict of 1839. Analyzing this continuity in the Ottoman legal discourse on honour, this project aims to trace continuities and changes in Ottoman governmental and punitive techniques over moral order, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early decades of the Tanzimat era, namely the 1840s and 1850s. Thus, it aims to investigate how gender and sexualities of the Ottoman subjects were contested and reshaped according to changing constitutional arrangements in this transition.

My research has three interrelated focuses. First, I investigate the correlation between legal discourse on honour and morality on the one hand and the legal practices governing sexual order on the other. This nexus will enable me to observe the social and gender implications of legal encounters between imperial political power and the sultans’ subjects. I will explore this dimension through the study of legal practice in the courts. I will focus on the shari‘a courts and the councils, which multiplied over time with the Tanzimat reforms.

Secondly, I take a closer look at the punitive order through a comparison of eighteenth-century legal documents with the criminal codes of 1840, 1851 and 1858, introduced in the Tanzimat era. Here I can build on my previous study of the new legal discourse incorporated in the legal codes and imperial edicts of the nineteenth century (Tuğ 2014). In so doing, I explore continuities and ruptures in the surveillance techniques of the Ottoman imperial government. Finally, I scrutinize the appellate system, which, loosely defined emerged in the eighteenth century, as apparent from the anecdote above: in the 1700s, people began to forward their petitions to provincial governors and higher-level judges asking for their supervision of the decision of local judges. By concentrating on the gradual shift from a loosely defined appellate structure to a more bureaucratized and hierarchized one, this project aims to analyze the governmental technologies of the Ottoman state and thus gain an understanding of the nature of political power when transiting from an early-modern structure to a modern one.