Islamic Family Law in Liquid Publicity: Production of Rights Discourse via the Press within the Ottoman Law of Family Rights

This study interrogates the transformations within Ottoman Islamic family law in the post-Tanzimat era, specifically focusing on the intersection of the Second Constitutional Period’s accelerated public sphere, the proliferation of print culture, and the normative contestations surrounding the 1917 Ottoman Law of Family Rights (Hukûk-ı Âile Kararnâmesi). Rather than conceptualizing family law reform as a purely technical exercise in codification, this article foregrounds the socio-legal dynamics that established family law as a critical site for negotiating legitimacy, methodology, and the public circulation or norms. The primary objectives is to shift the analytical focus away from discrete institutional outcomes -such as marriage, divorce, and poligyny- toward the more foundational question of how normative authority was produced, articulated, and stabilized amidst shifting administrative and discursive landscapes. Beginnin with the Tanzimat reforms, administrative modernization consolidated practices of registration, documentation, and surveillance, effectively rendering domestic relations legible to state institutions. This process of legibility did more than streamline governance; it repositioned family law as a domain inextricably linked to public order and state capacity. By the Second Constitutional Period, the instutituonalization of the press and the rise of women’s periodicals catalyzed the circulation of a rights- based vocabulary. Within this context, “rights” functioned not merely as a formal legal category but as a pervasive public idiom for claim-making, exerting unprecedented pressure on the legitimacy of inherited normative frameworks. The study contends that these pressure crystallized into two competing “thesis- antithesis” clusters: The Reformist Thesis: Mobilized concepts of justice, reform, and independent reasoning to advocate for interpretive adaptation and state-led regulatory intervention. The Traditional Antithesis: Emphasized order, continuity, and the preservation of juristic stability, rooted in an uṣūl - based discipline and evidentiary hierarchy. Crucially, the central conflict was often less about sprecific legal rulings and more about the meta-question of authority: who possessed the legitimate power to delimit the sphere of permissibility, and through which methodological framework could this authority be exercised? Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity is utilized here as an analytical lens -rather than a chronological label- to illuminate how accelerated norm-circulation and the pluralization of authority claims generated a climate of heightened uncertainty.