A Gendered History of Honor in the Ottoman Legal Praxis

Abstract

This chapter studies honor in the Ottoman legal praxis, particularly concerning the new Tanzimat penal codes of the nineteenth century. It mainly focuses on the 1858 Penal Code as the first criminal code that codified honor extensively in a comprehensive section devoted to various sexual offenses. It argues that the centralizing state of the Tanzimat expanded its control over the private sphere of its subjects. The state claimed to assert itself as the supreme arbiter of morality by entrusting women’s sexuality to its male subjects to control. Nevertheless, this gendered construction of morality based on honor has undermined its claims of creating a novel universal citizenship/subjecthood. This study also argues that the 1858 Penal Code was part of global codification movements in which the Napoleonic Code Pénal has been adapted according to local needs. Thus, it reveals how the section on sexual offenses and public outrage in the Code Pénal and the French gendered norms have been translated and adapted to the Ottoman moral codes of family and patriarchal honor with the introduction of ırz. © Nedim Nomer & Kaya Şahin 2024.