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With the inauguration of institutional reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century, the classical Ottoman library system, which had served Ottoman society and the educational infrastructure successfully for many centuries became increasingly obsolete as the new type of library began to appear. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century complaints about the conditions of foundation libraries markedly increased. Some attempts to redress the causes for the complaints were made, but these were generally unsuccessful. By the beginning of the twentieth century, these libraries had become institutions serving researchers in the field of Islamic culture and the occasional student pursuing the classical curriculum at the Islamic colleges. This article will trace the gradual process of these libraries to obsolescence and will attempt to discover the causes.As we have seen in previous articles (Erünsal 1984(Erünsal , 1985(Erünsal , 1996, the Ottoman library system grew from humble beginnings in the fourteenth century, when relatively small collections of books were donated to mosques, colleges and dervish convents, into sophisticated independent institutions by the end of the eighteenth century. As libraries were set up exclusively as charities, they were administered, as were all public institutions in the Ottoman Empire, according to the wishes of the founder, which were articulated in the donation deeds; this arrangement was protected by law. At the beginning the librarian in a mosque or college would work in the library on a part-time basis and would most likely have held a position as an imam or teacher, depending on the type of institution to which the library was attached. However, by the end of fifteenth century we find that founders were not only donating their books, but also providing the collections with an income to pay the salaries of librarians and other expenses connected with the care of the collections. By the second half of the seventeenth century we find large independent libraries established with large collections, with their own buildings and the necessary staff to service them. These libraries were founded to meet the needs of the students and teachers in the numerous colleges throughout the Empire. The works housed were almost exclusively manuscripts on classical Islamic subjects, such as law, exegesis, philosophy and theology, and the texts were mostly in Arabic. In some cases collections would house rare books on history, poetry, mysticism and other subjects reflecting the particular literary taste of the donor, but as mentioned, the vast majority of books were college texts in Arabic.By the end of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman library system had matured into a sophisticated network of collections of manuscript works, adequate to meet all the needs of the educational system. Paradoxically, this came at precisely the moment when a series of political crises and disastrous wars had convinced Ottoman statesmen to embrace modernisation, which effectively...

The institution of witness testimony played a critical role in the Ottoman judicial system. Judges (kadıs) made their final decisions almost solely on the basis of witness testimony. For this reason, great importance was attached to witness selection as the basis of justice, and careful methods were developed to prevent false testimony. Although this phenomenon was critical, scholarship on the institution of witnesses in the Ottoman judicial system, and on the witnesses themselves, is deficient. On one hand, there is no thorough-going study of the subject; the existing scholarship-from encyclopedia articles to doctoral dissertations, from published court registers to research on legal history-does little more than repeat the conventional wisdom. On the other hand, there are publications arguing that this system was a focus of unlawful practices. In this article, first of all, in order to establish the historical roots of the Ottoman implementation of şuhûdü'l-hâl, information will be provided on the concepts of 'udûl/ şuhûd/şuhûdü'l-'udûl in the medieval Islamic world, where they played an important * Makalemin hazırlanmasında her zaman olduğu gibi yardımlarını gördüğüm Prof. Dr. Bilgin Aydın ve Dr. Kenan Yıldız Beylere, özellikle metindeki Arapça ifadelerin tashihini yapan meslekdaşım Prof. Dr. Abdülkerim Özaydın'a ve makalemi inceleyerek değerli görüş ve tavsiyelerini ileten Mehmet Genç üstadımıza çok teşekkür ederim.