The Family Law of Non-Muslim Ottoman Citizens After The Tanzimat Reforms: Marriage And Divorce

Whenever “family in the Ottoman society” is mentioned, Muslim families are the first that comes to mind. However, there were also non-Muslim families in the Ottoman society. As a multinational state, about half of the Ottoman subjects were Armenians, Greeks, and Jews. Thanks to the tolerance shown to them, these non-Muslims, as they were called, continued their existence in the Ottoman State until its collapse. Thus, studying their lives in the Ottoman State is important to reveal a section of the non-Muslim Ottomans’ history. This study addresses the practice of family law of non-Muslims in the Ottoman society. The study examines the autonomy of non-Muslims in terms of family law, the influence of the gender of those non-Muslims, who converted to Islam, on their legal status, and non-Muslims’, especially non-Muslim women, preference of sharia courts, due to some advantages offered by the Ottoman courts, over autonomous community courts. Then, Ottoman legal arrangements on the family law of non-Muslims are examined. In the Ottoman State, there were some interventions in the field of family law before the Family Law Decree of 1917 and even before the Population Registration Law of 1881. The Family Law Decree, however, was the first significant legislation towards the non-Muslim community. Therefore, the clergymen of the non-Muslims, who could not accept the situation, applied to the Office of the High Commissioner of the Allied Powers to regain their previous authorities, which resulted in the abolishment of the decree soon. By approaching the related legislations under two separate headings as those of the 19th century, on the one hand, and the Family Law Decree of 1917, on the other hand, the current study takes an effort to reveal the influence of these legislations on the family law of Ottoman non-Muslims