The Textual Evolution of the Ottoman Şeyhülislam s’ Fetva s

In this article, we use a mix of computational techniques to identify textual shifts in the Ottoman şeyhülislam s’ fetva s between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Our analysis, supplemented by a close reading of these texts, indicates that the fetva s underwent multiple forms of transformation, a consequence of the institutional evolution of the şeyhülislam ’s fetva office ( fetvahane ) that aimed to speed up and streamline the production of the fetva s: over time, the texts appropriated a more uniform character and came to contain shorter responses. In the compositions of the questions, we identified many “trigger terms” that facilitated reflexive responses independent of the fetva s’ jurisprudential contexts, a tendency that became stronger after the second half of the seventeenth century. In addition, we propose in the article a methodology that measures the relative strengths of textual and conceptual links among the fetva corpora of various Ottoman şeyhülislam s. This analysis informs us about possible paths of long-term evolution of this genre of jurisprudential documents

Aesthetics · Art · Character (mathematics) · Linguistics · Literature · Period (music) · Reading (process) · Reflexivity · Social science · Sociology · Term (time) · Authorship Attribution and Profiling · Families in Therapy and Culture · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Mathematics · Philosophy

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  Open Access•Boğaç A Ergene, Atabey Kaygun•International Journal Middle East…•2022

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