The political background of justice

After the decline of the caliphate of Baghdad, the Muslim world witnessed the rise of kingship in the shape of foreign dynasties hailing from the steppes of Central Asia. After the military power of the Būyids, Qarakhānids, Saljūqs, Ayyūbids and Mamlūks was spent, the two dynasties that ruled the majority of Muslim lands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the Ottomans (1389–1922) and the Qājārs (1779–1924). The latter were preceded by the Ṣafavids (1501–1732), who converted Iran to Twelver-Shīʿism from what was mostly Sunnite Ḥanafism. The Qājār rule was politically and militarily weak, and its system of organization decentralized and bureaucratically thin. The Ottomans, on the other hand, were preceded by the Mamlūks, who in turn might never have come into existence, much less sustain themselves as a ruling dynasty, without the military manpower supplied by the Mongols or by the peoples the latter had conquered, most notably the Kipchaks. An important element of this manpower was the Mamlūk purchase from merchants of kidnapped or enslaved boys – a system that was adopted and developed by the Ottomans. It is thus remarkable that – unlike the European populations that were engaged by their nobility in a constant state of warfare – the local populations of the Middle East rarely faced military conscription. More remarkable, and causally connected with the administration of justice, was the resultant fact that an enormous cultural, linguistic and ethnic wedge separated the ruling dynasties from the populations they ruled.