Event Details - Greenberg Residency Lecture

Rule of Law in the Middle East: The Ottoman Antecedent
Avi Rubin
Department of Middle East Studies
Ben-Gurion University

The paradigm of "Oriental despotism", which had emerged in Renaissance thought and later dominated Orientalist scholarship, has been systematically refuted since the 1970s, mainly (but not exclusively) through the scholarship of social historians of the Middle East. Taking up a socio-legal perspective, the lecture will offer the rule of law as a key category for analyzing social and legal change in the Ottoman Empire. Rule of law as it developed in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire was a precursor to particular versions of the rule of law in the successor nation states, namely Turkey, most of the Arab states and Israel. Hence, any attempt to understand the law as it has been imagined in the modern Middle East should take into account the Ottoman antecedent.      

Open to the public

http://www.skidmore.edu/greenberg-residency/index.php

Sponsored by: the Office of the Dean of Special Programs