Law of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire governed under a dual legal framework that combined sultanic law, known as qanun or kanun, with religious Islamic jurisprudence, chiefly of the Hanafi school. The qanun coexisted with religious law as part of a broader scheme for holding together the empire's diverse, multi religious population under a single system of governance. Ottoman legal administration operated through three kinds of courts: Islamic courts for Muslim subjects, confessional courts for non Muslim religious communities administered by their own appointed Jewish and Christian leaders, and trade courts. The empire's religious scholars, the ulema, held theoretical authority to invalidate a secular provision that contradicted Islamic law, but in practice they rarely challenged the sultan's own kanuns. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/