Civilizational Exceptions: Ottoman Law and Governance in Late Ottoman Palestine AHMAD AMARA In June 1899, the Ottoman Sultan issued an edict confirming the founda- tion in southern Palestine of a new subdistrict, and the building of the town of Birüssebi, the Ottoman name for Beersheba. 1 The Ottoman goal was to build a permanent administration designed exclusively for the local Arab tribal communities, known today as the Bedouin. Despite the law’s requirement to establish a civil (nizâmiye) court alongside the Islamic (şerîat) court in Beersheba, the Ottoman Council of State decided in 1902 not to establish a nizamiye court. Instead, it allowed the local administrative council to sit as a judicial forum and carry the practice of mediation and conciliation among the Bedouin based on the local law and custom. The Beersheba administrative council was thus staffed by Law and History Review November 2018, Vol. 36, No. 4 © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2018 doi:10.1017/S0738248018000342 Ahmad Amara is a Polonsky Academy Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute <ahmadamara@gmail.com>. The author thanks the following persons for reading earlier drafts and for their helpful comments and support throughout the writing of this article: Zachary Lockman, Ronald Zweig, Lauren Benton, Avi Rubin, Samuel Dolbee, Sandra Ashhab, Lena Salaymeh, and Umit Kurt. The author also thanks the staff of the State Ottoman Archives’ in Istanbul, Fuat Recep and Ayten Erdel; Abdulla Ugur for his assistance in translations; and the anonymous review- ers of Law and History Review for their valuable reviews. The writing of this arti- cle and the research were made possible by the support of the Social Science Research Council and the Palestinian American Research Center. 1. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri, The Ottoman State Archives, Istanbul, Turkey (hereaf- ter BOA), BOA.DH.TMİK-S 25/62, 27 Mayıs 1315/June 8, 1899, letter from the minister of the interior to the Grand Vizier. On Ottoman Beersheba, see Yasemin Avci, “The Application of Tanzimat in the Desert: The Bedouins and the Creation of a New Town in Southern Palestine, 1860–1914,” Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2009): 969–83. of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248018000342 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 89.138.80.12, on 27 Dec 2018 at 22:13:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms