TY - BOOK ID - 103645384 TI - The grammars of adjudication : the economics of judicial decision making in fin-de-siècle Ottoman Beirut and Damascus PY - 2007 SN - 235159052X 282181559X 2351592697 PB - Presses de l’Ifpo DB - UniCat KW - Judicial process (Islamic law) KW - Procedure (Islamic law) KW - Evidence, Documentary (Islamic law) KW - Law, Politics & Government KW - Canon Law KW - Islamic law KW - droit islamique KW - économie KW - waqf KW - justice KW - droit UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:103645384 AB - Most studies on Islamic, Arab and Ottoman societies are content with the role of testimony that texts available to researchers can play, thus reducing the role of text and language to a mimetic description of past events. The point here is to show that any understanding of social relations implies, first, to consider the textual production of a society by questioning the meaning assignable to the texts themselves. It also supposes that the analysis of texts, whatever their societal and institutional context, must consider its sources as discursive practices, in order not to reduce them to their preliminary function of factual testimony. Drawing on a wide variety of Ottoman "legal" texts produced in Beirut and Damascus in the 19th century, this book avoids linking these texts to the normative values of “Islamic law”, but on the contrary documents the way in which discursive practices operate concretely on a specific terrain. Different levels of practices then emerge, all documented by the social actors who made their very existence possible. ER -