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.