Vol. 2 No. 10 (October, 1992) pp. 129-130
LAW AS METAPHOR: FROM ISLAMIC COURTS TO THE PALACE OF JUSTICE by
June Starr. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 243
pp.
Reviewed by David M. Engel, School of Law, SUNY at Buffalo.
In the late 1960s, June Starr conducted research on disputing in
a rural, seaside village in southwestern Turkey. She explored the
mechanisms by which disputes were handled and related
village-level, unofficial dispute processing to the activities of
the district court in the provincial center of Bodrum. Returning
to her subject roughly twenty years later, Starr discovered that
much had changed in her research setting. During her first stay,
the town of Bodrum had been a quiet and isolated place, but in
the 1980s she found that it had become a "chic summer
gathering place" for the "beautiful people,"
including Mick Jagger and Princess Margaret. Formerly difficult
of access, it now boasted an airport, an enlarged facility to
accommodate nearly 200 yachts, and a nearby "Club Med."
Tourism and prosperity had transformed Bodrum, and a visit to a
nearby village suggested that there were ripple effects
throughout the rural countryside.
Starr tried to resist a broadly negative view of these changes or
a romanticized nostalgia for her research site as it used to be.
Yet her sentiments were clearly divided, and she found it
difficult -- as most of us would -- to reengage with the place
and the people with whom she had once lived:
I could not bring myself to impose new memories over those I
still cherish from the village I knew so well, so I did not
return to Mandalinci [the fictitious name for the village where
she had lived from 1966 to 1968], al- though someday I may. Nor
did I look up my Bodrum friends, whom I also treasure, although
someday I may do that, too. (86)
The book she has written is, not surprisingly, a reflection on
time and change. Starr avoids what might have been a more obvious
choice, however, and does NOT ask simply how the village and the
court have been transformed during the twenty years between her
first and second visits. Indeed, as the quoted passage makes
clear, she did not even return to the village that had been the
primary focus of her earlier study. Instead, Starr has written a
far more ambitious book, which addresses issues of law and
society across centuries rather than decades and which considers
not only Bodrum District but the larger geographical expanse of
the Ottoman Empire and the modern state of Turkey. She asks how
anthropologists and historians, by merging their insights, might
trace broad processes of legal, political, and social change at
both state and local levels. She argues that a shifting focus
from the national stage to the village and district level is
essential for understanding the workings and meanings of law
within states.
The clue that begins this adventurous intellectual
"chase" across centuries and subcontinents is a fact so
obvious that the author had failed to recognize its significance
in her earlier writings: As I pondered the events that had
changed the course of Turkish history, paralleling them to the
data I had collected in Bodrum, I realized something so obvious I
had taken it for granted, namely, how important secular law and a
generally secular outlook had been in Bodrum town and in the
village I studied. . . . In Bodrum district of those years,
although the people practiced Islam, there was little interest in
pursuing Islamic solutions to conflicts. (xxxiv)
The puzzle is, why would the Islamic citizens of Bodrum handle
their conflicts by
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secular means and with reference to secular norms? In attempting
to answer this question, Starr demonstrates how the everyday
lives of villagers are linked to those of distant elites in the
urban centers and how present contests over land, families, and
gender relations are shaped by historical events of the recent --
and distant -- past.
Starr sketches the formation of the modern Turkish state, under
the leadership of Ataturk, out of the remains of the Ottoman
empire in the early twentieth century. The eventual triumph of
secular, western-oriented ideology at that time can be explained
not only by the traumatic upheavals and population shifts
following World War I, but also by events during the nineteenth
century that led to the emergence of secular political and legal
thought among the young, educated elite who supported Ataturk and
his reforms.
The remarkable activities of Ataturk led not only to the creation
of a Turkish state but to the displacement of Islamic law and
legal institutions. The Eurocentric, reformist spirit of the age
is captured by Starr in a remarkable quote, in which Ataturk's
new minister of justice, Mahmut Es'ad Bey, explains why Islamic
family law would be replaced in Turkey by the wholesale adoption
of the Swiss code:
Why waste our time trying to produce something new when
quite good Codes are to be found ready made? . . . The
Swiss Code is a good Code; I am going to have it adopted,
and I shall ask the Assembly to proceed to a vote en
bloc, as Napoleon had his Code voted. If it had to be
discussed article by article, we should never get through
it. (16)
How an Islamic country got to the point where it seemed sensible
to transplant Swiss family law "en bloc," and what the
consequences of this legal transformation were at the district
and village level, are the questions that animate this
fascinating study. Unlike other studies that emphasize the
resilience of traditional social and religious structures in the
face of state- level encroachments, this study is largely a
"success story" from the perspective of the reforming
elites. In this book, moreover, the government and its
functionaries (including the judges) are not portrayed in
menacing terms, nor is the dominance of western legal and
political theory over Islam viewed with regret. Other writers,
operating from different perspectives, might have told the story
differently.
The reasons for the predominance of secularism are complex and
appear to relate to demographic and political factors as much as
to the force of law and legal institutions. Starr does not
pretend to be able to tell the whole story, and readers will come
away from this book with the feeling that it provides intriguing
clues and suggestions rather than definitive explanations.
Nonetheless, the plan of the book is ambitious, and the narrative
swings back and forth from large-scale to small-scale inquiries.
At times this leads to a sense of disorganization and redundancy.
It is a difficult strategy to carry off. The author must identify
and explain matters -- at the local and the national levels --
that are sometimes very complex. For the most part, she succeeds.
The presentation is clear, unpretentious, and readily
understandable by those who know little about Turkey. More
importantly, this book suggests a multi-level approach to the
study of law and legal change that will help to shape the
research of scholars who are increasingly committed to the
proposition that local, national, and global processes must be
studied in terms of their interrelationships and interactions
over time. Because it tells a fascinating story and because it
suggests a research strategy that would be appropriate in other
contexts, this is a book well worth reading.