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What do we know about the history of international law in the Islamic world? We asked a select group of historians and legal scholars to explore this understudied field of history, as part of the Cambridge History of International Law series. As editors of volume eight of that series, we are pleased to draw from a diverse set of sources concerning both the medieval Islamic world (622–1453) and the Ottoman era (1453–1923).
Contributions to the first part of the volume, which focuses on the medieval period, examine the reach of international relations in early Islamic law, stretching from Iran and Iraq to the Andalusian and Maghrib territories of present-day Algeria, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, and Tunisia, as well as developments in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia along the coast of the Indian Ocean. Contributors draw on legal treatises and collections of juristic opinions or judicial manuals, but also on historical chronicles, diplomatic letters, and papyri records, all of which shed light on the international legal rules and ideas of this period and region. The first three centuries of Islamic law – the seventh to ninth centuries CE – are its founding period, the period in which the architects of the Islamic law edifice first laid the foundations for its sources, methods, and doctrines, both within and beyond the borders of the Muslim empire. The Prophet’s encounters with imperial rulers in the seventh century through caliphal negotiations of war, as well as commerce through the ninth century, materially shaped the idea of Islamic international law and relations. What defined the rules of diplomacy or authorized Muslim rulers to declare war? How did their rules of war define jihād and regulate the Crusades? How and why did judges mediate differences between different subjects? These questions percolated in the minds of jurists of the tenth and eleventh centuries, who sought to bring order to an evolving world of international law and relations as the empire started to break up into several smaller principalities and the integrity of the community required greater order in the law: juristic interpretation, judicial rulings, and caliphal rulings. By 1258, the year of the fall of Baghdad, the Muslim empire witnessed the dramatic invasion by the Mongols, who would put each of these questions to the test. The year symbolized the end of the Abbasid Caliphate and the beginning of a series of dynasties which would appeal to different rules with regard to warfare, empire-building, and the Crusades.
Contributions to the second part of the volume, which focuses on the Ottoman era, examine the contested status of various visions of international law in the Ottoman Empire. This part of the volume commences with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, selected as a chronological point of departure due to its structural importance for Ottoman and European relations and its status as a particularly potent symbol of the empire’s ambiguous role in the emergent European state system. It comes to a conclusion with the empire’s formal dissolution in 1923, the systemic after-effects of which continue to be felt today. The period’s spatial sphere of application is defined by the uneven legal and political topography of the Ottoman Empire itself: the contributors discuss not only the empire’s ‘core’ Balkan and Anatolian provinces, but also its various semi-sovereign tributaries and dependencies. The focus is on the Ottoman Empire, a state that was home to the caliphate and in possession of Mecca and Medina, as a critical (though certainly not exclusive) locus of engagement with and interpretation of international law in the Islamic world.
Contributions to this second part deal with issues of private as well as public international law, drawing upon archival materials, published documents (in Ottoman Turkish as well as other languages, including, of course, Western languages), and relevant secondary literature from a host of disciplines, including but not limited to international legal history, diplomatic history, economic history, intellectual history, and social history. They focus on key Ottoman jurists, scholars, diplomats, and functionaries; debates about the Ottoman Empire’s place in (or its relation to) the development of the European state system; the empire’s complex role in the emergence and consolidation of the modern capitalist world economy; and the competing ways of interpreting, transforming, and repudiating Euro-American models of international legal order that found expression in Ottoman methods of interacting with the non-Ottoman world. Contributing to a nascent body of literature on the international legal history of the Ottoman Empire, the essays comprising this part demonstrate the centrality of the empire for understanding the history of what we have become accustomed to calling ‘international law’.
