The grammars of adjudication

Most studies on Islamic, Arab, and Ottoman societies and civilizations are
trapped into the evidentiary role of the texts that researchers have at their
disposal, considerably reducing the role of text and language to a mimetic
description of what happened. This book argues that an understanding of social
relations primarily implies taking into consideration the textual production
of society in terms of the meanings that could be ascribed to the texts
themselves, and, second, that the analysis of texts, whatever their societal
and institutional contexts, should look at its sources as discursive
practices, in order not to reduce them to their preliminary role of bearers of
factual evidence. Drawing from a large variety of Ottoman “legal” texts from
nineteenth-century Beirut and Damascus, this book avoids ascribing such texts
to the normative values of “Islamic law,” by documenting instead how various
discursive practices concretely operate within a particular terrain. Different
levels of practises therefore emerge, all of which documented by the social
actors that made their existence possible.