In this chapter I turn my focus away from the institutions and authorities that structured Ottoman Cairo's legal system to take in the perspective of the litigants who used it. How did Cairenes navigate the pluralism of their city's judicial infrastructure? What strategies did they employ? What did they expect to gain from their engagement with the legal system? Approaching our subject from the perspective of the litigant, or the legal consumer, helps us to understand how Cairo's legal system actually functioned, rather than how its creators and administrators wanted it to work. In all societies, litigants and other court users manipulate the legal process for their own ends, often in ways not intended by the rulers, jurists, and judges who create and manage the legal system.

As this book has demonstrated, Cairenes had a number of options available when they wanted to resolve a dispute. The default institution was the network of sharīca courts dispersed throughout the city and its suburbs. Cairenes could also send a petition to the Sultan or approach the governor's Dīwān. As described in Chapter 3, procedurally there was not a great deal to choose between these different institutions. All ultimately relied on the same understanding of evidence, which held the eye-witness testimony of two Muslim men to be the paradigm of proof, presented and assessed according to the same set of procedures overseen by a qāḍī. The bureaucratic procedures of the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn, described in Chapter 3, were only used to produce a judgment when they could reliably stand in for testimony: when the case rested on a document that could be verified by the palace's archives or by the authentication mechanisms embedded in a ḥujja physically presented to the Dīvān. There was also no formal hierarchy between the sharīca court, the Dīwān al-cĀlī and the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn, and no recognized system of appeal. Despite the similar functioning of these institutions, litigants saw them as offering different possibilities: how this worked is one theme of this chapter.

Cairenes could avoid adjudication by opting for mediation. Ṣulḥ had a close relationship with the sharīca court and the Dīwān al-cĀlī. The practice of Ṣulḥ was almost the opposite of formal adjudication—unstructured rather than procedural, relying on persuasion rather than formal evidence, aiming to extract concessions from both parties rather than to decide a winner—and it could produce strikingly different results.