that create primary sources in the form they come down to us. Du’s excavation of Fatima’s case can serve as a model for legal historians of any era or region in teasing apart the different gendered actors and social meanings that construct the records we use."

source for western orientalists with their own ideas about gender and Islam. In doing so, he draws on scholarship from multiple fields to show how women in the Indian Ocean world helped “co-produce” legal and archival records, only for their presence to be silenced through the layers of recension...

the issue itself and its resolution, in a pluralistic legal world where “Islamic law” was central but not hegemonic or monolithic; the way it came to be included in a South Asian manual of different prose genres that usually focused on male actors; and the way that manual itself became an iconic...

"In this piece, Du uses a source long familiar to South Asianists—a short account of a court case between a free Muslim woman and enslaved peoples he owned, in multiple legal fora across the Indian Ocean—to ask new questions. Du considers the case at three levels:...

Three good readings on this:

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

www.jstor.org/stable/26004...

and more from Aksan: www.amazon.com/Ottoman-Wars...

THEN the ayan became a real problem--but only some of them. It was ayan who restored Mahmud II after Selim was overthrown by janissaries. They were fine with military reform if it came with some guarantees for them, and that worked out well for Mahmud until he had the power to go his own way.

The thing is Levy takes this too far back. Sultans were less competent and had less power after Süleyman, but the bureaucrats ran the state just fine. And the ayan were pretty good at raising troops. Good logistics+manpower+excellent cavalry compensated for poor infantry tactics until the 1770s.

He has now been released

Excellent story, thank you. But I do wonder, did this have to be phrased so ambivalently? Mladic has in fact been convicted of multiple war crimes. I think a parenthetical note of that would have been appropriate.

99% chance that last paragraph was written by ChatGPT

he saw his uncle get overthrown, held prisoner for months, and stabbed to death. He only survived by running across the rooftops, staying one step ahead of his pursuers until loyal troops arrived