SHARIAsource Lunch Talk :: A Gentleman and a Scholar: Profile of an Ottoman Judge in the Late Sixteenth Century

SHARIAsource guest lecturer Amir Toft presented to a group of twelve students and scholars on “A Gentleman and a Scholar: Profile of an Ottoman Judge in the Late Sixteenth Century” during the May 1st ILSP: SHARIAsource Lunch Talk. Toft is a 2017-2018 Research Fellow in the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School and Ph.D. candidate in Islamic Thought in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Using a court register from the late sixteenth century case about a homicide case, Toft compelled the audience to consider the non-explicit elements of the record—in particular the judge. His discussion spanned historiography and legal history, and guided the audience into considering questions about social and judicial structures in the Ottoman Empire, and what texts recorded then explicitly and implicitly reveal. This event was livetweeted.