Jun AKIBA 125 A NEW SCHOOL FOR QADIS: EDUCATION OF THE SHARIA JUDGES IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE* I n 1855, a new school for qadis opened in Istanbul to give professional training to future judges recruited from among medrese students. Mu‘allimhane-i Nüvvab, or the Naibs’ College, as the school was first named, remained open until the end of the Ottoman Empire under vari- ous names — Mekteb-i Nüvvab, Mekteb-i Kuzat and then Medresetü’l- Kuzat — while expanding its role in producing Sharia judges for the Empire. The school marked an important innovation in the history of education in the Ottoman Empire as well as in the long tradition of Islamic education. The history of the Naibs’ College not only shows the emergence of new approaches to the education of judges in the Empire, but also reflects the centralizing efforts of the ≤eyhülislâm’s Office (Bab-ı Me≥ihat) and the ulema’s struggle for survival in this changing environment. Jun AKIBA is research fellow of the Japan Society for the promotion of science, Insti- tute of oriental culture, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan. * An earlier version of this paper was read at the workshop “∞Interrelationship between Knowledge and Society in the Islamic World,∞” held under the Islamic Area Studies Pro- ject at the University of Tokyo, on 27 October 2001. This research was partially sup- ported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japanese Ministry of Educa- tion. Support for my research in Turkey from 1998 to 2000 was provided by the Heiwa Nakajima Foundation. I am grateful to Yücel Terziba≥oglu and Iris Agmon for their help- ful comments for improving the final draft of this paper. I also thank professors Tadashi Suzuki and Hiroyuki Yanagihashi for their valuable suggestions. Turcica, 35, 2003, pp. 125-163 126 JUN AKIBA Since the beginning of the Tanzimat, the Ottoman Sharia court had faced continuous challenges from newly created institutions. First, the local administrative councils, composed of local officials and representa- tives of the local population, were set up and took over the administrative and financial functions of the Sharia courts. These councils also had the judicial authority to hear administrative and criminal cases. In addition, the appointment of civil administrators (müdir, and later kaymakam) to kazas (districts) after 1842 almost confined the Sharia judges to a narrow judicial sphere. By 1864, as part of the provincial reforms, a new secular court system (mahkeme-i Nizamiye) was established by separating the judicial function from the duties of the local councils. The Nizamiye courts would hear civil and criminal cases according to the state law, apart from existing Sharia courts. In consequence, the jurisdiction of the Sharia courts was largely reduced to matters concerning personal status (marriage, alimony, inheritance, etc.) and waqfs. Still, it must be noted that it was a Sharia judge who assumed the office of chief judge of the secular court. Until the end of the Empire, the judge of the Sharia court was at the same time normally functioning as the chief judge of the civil court in the Nizamiye court system, although this new position of the Sharia judge did not go unchallenged by the Ministry of Justice1. There were problems in the institution of the Sharia judiciary as well. Since the eighteenth century, the delegation of the qadis’ duties to their deputies (naibs) had become a prevalent practice. This caused serious problems of abuse, since naibs tended to charge excessive court fees to cover the payments to qadi title-holders, while the appointment of naibs escaped from the state’s direct control. From the early nineteenth cen- tury on, the state repeatedly tried to centralize the appointment of naibs, which eventually turned qadis into mere nominal title-holders. The 1 On the judicial reforms in the late Ottoman Empire, see C.V. FINDLEY, “∞Mahkama, 2. The Ottoman Era, ii. The Reform Era (ca. 1789-1922),∞” EI2, 6, p. 5-9∞; Adolf HEID- BORN, Manuel de droit public et administratif de l’Empire ottoman, 2 vols.,Vienna and Leipzig, C.W. Stern, 1908-1912, 1, p. 216-266∞; Musa ÇADIRCI, Tanzimat Döneminde Anadolu Kentleri’nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Yapıları, Ankara, TTK, 1991, p. 222-223, 240- 248, 279-283∞; Sedat BINGÖL, “∞Tanzimat Sonrası Ta≥ra ve Merkezde Yargı Reformu,∞” in Osmanlı, 12 vols., Istanbul, Yeni Türkiye Yay., 1999, 6, p. 533-545∞; Jun AKIBA, “∞From Kadı to Naib∞: Reorganization of the Ottoman Sharia Judiciary in the Tanzimat Period,∞” paper presented at the 15th CIEPO Symposium, London, July 2002 (to be published). See also David KUSHNER, “∞The Place of the Ulema in the Ottoman Empire during the Age of Reform (1839-1918),∞” Turcica, 29, 1987, p. 60-62. The commercial court was first established in Istanbul in 1839 and later extended to each commercial center of the Empire. EDUCATION OF THE SHARIA JUDGES IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 127 choice of the plural of “∞naib∞” (nüvvab) for the qadis’ school reflects this development2. The primary purpose of this article is to investigate the establishment and development of the Naibs’ College in the context of the Ottoman reforms in the Sharia judiciary and in the judicial insti- tutions in general. Our second concern here is to locate the education and pedagogy applied in the Naibs’ College within the framework of the history of Ottoman education. In spite of its importance and relatively long history in comparison with the other new civil schools set up after the Tanzimat reforms3, few studies have been devoted to the Naibs’ College. Studies on the education system of the late Ottoman Empire4 usually concentrate on new-style schools and do not generally cover the Naibs’ College any more than the traditional medreses, which still remained active until the very end of the Empire. Some studies do make positive remarks on the school, but they usually only deal with its later history based on its 1914 regulations5. Only three recent studies deal with the Naibs’ College. One is a study on the architecture of the school’s new building of 19136. The 2 The transition from kadı to naib is discussed in AKIBA, “∞From Kadı to Naib.∞” See also FINDLEY, “∞Mahkama, 2.∞” For an outline of the classical Ottoman Sharia judiciary, see Ismail Hakkı UZUNÇAR≤LI, Osmanlı Devletinin Ilmiye Te≥kilâtı, Ankara, TTK, 1965, esp., p. 83-118∞; Halil INALCIK, “∞Mahkama, 2. The Ottoman Empire, i. The Earlier Cen- turies,∞” EI2, 6, p. 3-5∞; Ilber ORTAYLI, Hukuk ve Idare Adamı Olarak Osmanlı Devletinde Kadı, Ankara, Turhan, 1994∞; Feda ≤amil ARIK, “∞Osmanlılar’da Kadılık Müessesesi,∞” OTAM, 8, 1997, p. 1-72. The classical naibs are studied in Gilles VEINSTEIN, “∞Sur les nâ’ib ottomans (XVe-XVIe siècles),∞” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 25, 2001, p. 247-267. 3 Among important civil schools, Mekteb-i Mülkiye (the School for Civil Service) was established in 1859, Mekteb-i Sultani (Galatasaray Lycée) in 1868 and Mekteb-i Hukuk (the Law School) in 1880. 4 Bayram KODAMAN, Abdülhamid Devri Egitim Sistemi, Istanbul, Ötüken, 1980∞; Yahya AKYÜZ, Türk Egitim Tarihi (Ba≥langıçtan 1993’e), Istanbul, Kültür Koleji, 1993∞; Selçuk Ak≥ın SOMEL, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839-1908∞: Islamization, Autocracy and Discipline, Leiden, Brill, 2001, to name but a few. 5 Osman ERGIN, Istanbul Mektepleri ve Ilim, Terbiye ve San’at Müesseseleri Dolayısiyle Türkiye Maarif Tarihi, 5 vols., 2nd ed., Istanbul, Eser Matbaası, 1977, 1-2, p. 158-159∞; UZUNÇARILI, Ilmiye Te≥kilâtı, op. cit., p. 268-270∞; Ya≥ar SARIKAYA, Medreseler ve Modernle≥me, Istanbul, Iz Yayıncılık, 1997, p. 93-94, 175-176∞; Hüseyin ATAY, Osmanlılarda Yüksek Din Egitimi, Istanbul∞, Dergâh Yay., 1983, p. 305. These studies agree that the Naibs’ College produced many competent judges who served both in Sharia and Nizamiye courts. The same opinion can be found in Ilber ORTAYLI, Impara- torlugun En Uzun Yüzyılı, 3rd ed., Istanbul, Hil Yayın, 1995, p. 122. 6 Yıldırım YAVUZ, “∞Mimar Kemalettin Yapısı 1913 Tarihli Medresetü’l-Kuzat’ın In≥aat ≤artnamesi ve Ke≥if Defterleri,∞” in Aptullah Kuran Için Yazılar / Essays in Hon- our of Aptullah Kuran, ed. Çigdem Kafescioglu and Lucienne Thys-≤enocak, Istanbul, Yapı Kredi Yay., 1999, p. 461-499. 128 JUN AKIBA other two focus on the college’s graduates originating from southern Albania7 and the Caucasus8, respectively, underlining the college’s role in social mobility. Finally, this article aims at contributing to the further understanding of the Ottoman court practice. Despite recent developments in the study of the Ottoman Sharia courts, rather less attention has been paid to the qadis’ background9. Research on how they were trained and on which fields of knowledge they were trained in could help us understand the qadis’ actual practice in the application of the law. We know to a certain extent what kind of textbooks on Islamic law were used in the medreses10, but the link between theory in the legal textbooks and prac- tice in the court remains unclear, and developments in this area during the nineteenth century have usually been neglected. So far we have at least two excellent studies on the education of qadis in the Middle East coming from two anthropologists. One is Dale Eick- elman’s work of a social biography of a rural Moroccan judge11, whose intellectual formation under the traditional but nonetheless colonial milieu is comparable with that of judges during the late Ottoman period12. The other is a study on writing and authority in Yemeni society by Brinkley Messick13, which focuses on the texts of Sharia jurispru- 7 Nathalie CLAYER, “∞Les cadis de l’après Tanzimat∞: l’exemple des cadis originaires d’Ergiri et Libohova,∞” Turcica, 32, 2000, p.