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Copyright of Osmanli Arastirmalari is the property of Turkiye Diyanet Foundation Centre for Islamic Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Based on narratives, including 'urban legends', and Ottoman archival sources, this article deals with prostitution in the Ottoman Empire in view of its legal and judicial treatment according to both Sharia and sultanic law. Ottoman policies towards prostitution included measures and punishments ranging from milder (imprisonment, expulsion, taxation, legalization of brothels) to harsher (death sentence and corporal punishment). Since the Ottoman Empire included territories of a great variety of peoples and local customs the measures applied changed over time and varied across places. The author puts forward the hypothesis that the harshness of punishment depended perhaps also on the impact of conservative religious circles such as the Kadizâdelis and Mujaddidiyah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between the Ottoman Empire's Kadızadeli Islamic movement and the Islamic religious leader Muḥammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhāb's Islamic movement known as the Muwaḥḥidūn movement form the late 16th century through the 18th century, including in regard to the scholarship of each movement and Kadızadeli's attitudes on Sufism. The Muwaḥḥidūn movement's influence on the founding of Saudi Arabia is discussed.

The tobacco controversy in the Early Modern Ottoman society has attracted the attention of many scholars. Social and legal aspects of the consumption of coffee and subsequently of tobacco depicted new forms of sociability that would become the hallmark of the Early Modern Period. Despite rulers' ban and oppression from above, the new habit is to spread rapidly and transcend social, religious and confessional barriers. Albeit these important developments, the effort of ottoman elites Muslim and non-Muslim alike to restrain and manipulate social behaviour has received little attention. A comparison of Akhisari's treatise against smoking and Nikolaos Mavrokordatos' admonition against tobacco depicted that Muslim and non-Muslim ottoman elites shared the same ideas on the ban of tobacco consumption and uncontrollable sociability. It is thus to no surprise that in their quest for social control the ottoman elites employed even the same argumentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]