Ottoman Cairo's legal system was a complex web of overlapping jurisdictions. This feature of Ottoman legal practice has been overlooked by many historians, who have focused overwhelmingly on the sharīca court as the central institution of Ottoman justice. The sharīca courts were undoubtedly important, but their high profile in Ottoman legal historiography is a result of the survival of many thousands of sharīca court registers, which have become the main source for Ottoman social and economic history. Other legal institutions and actors left few records, and so have been marginalized in the historiography. In the case of Egypt, the contrast with the legal historiography of the preceding Mamluk Sultanate is striking. With a few exceptions, sharīca court records from the Mamluk period have not survived. Mamluk legal historians have therefore relied largely on normative legal texts, chronicles, and biographical dictionaries. The resulting historiography has placed far more emphasis on jurisdictions other than the sharīca court, including the maẓālim tribunals, the courts of the Mamluk amīrs and the muḥtasib.

It is worth imagining what the legal historiography of Ottoman Egypt would look like if the Ottoman sharīca court records had not survived. The image of legal practice painted by the available chronicles would look more similar to that given by Mamlukists: Janissary officers, the police chief, and the muḥtasib play a key role in suppressing crime and regulating the markets; the beys hold courts in their private residences. Small archival collections in Cairo, such as the few registers of the governor's Dīwān, would assume far greater importance: most likely one or more monographs on the Dīwān would have been written, instead of a handful of footnotes. Lacking significant archival material in Egypt, far more historians would use the Prime Ministry Archive in Istanbul, and so the role of the imperial government in Egyptian legal affairs would loom much larger. This exercise is not intended to denigrate scholarship based on sharīca court records, nor to claim that they are exhausted as sources: given their great number and the intimate detail of legal, social, and economic life that they contain, Ottoman sharīca court records are inexhaustible.