Their profession was relatively new. Until the nineteenth century, justice in the Ottoman Empire — as in all Muslim states at the time — had operated largely through the auspices of local kedi-s (judges). While punishments, especially capital ones, were enforced by magistrates delegated from the central authority, those judges were independent members of a pan-Islamic learned network, their rulings based on their school of Islamic jurisprudence rather than codified law. (So independent were they that in big cities, people would “shop” for the judge whose school might give you the best outcome — Hanbalis, for instance, were always a good bet for women seeking divorce.) According to Ottoman historian Kent F. Schull, the late nineteenth century saw the central government, partially though not entirely in response to pressure from its European allies, increasingly impose itself on these acephal networks: in the 1870s, it promulgated the Mecelle, the first governmental codification of Islamic jurisprudence and founded the Nizamiye (“Regular”) court system; while trained like their forerunners in Islamic law, those judges were ultimately responsible to the state, not God.
