Endowments, Rulers and Community: Waqf al-Haramayn Ottoman Algiers.

• Author: CLANCY-SMITH, JULIA
• Position: Review

Endowments, Rulers and Community: Waqf al-Haramayn Ottoman Algiers. By MIRIAM HOEXTER. Studies in Islamic Law and Society, vol. 6. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1998. Pp. vii + 188. HF1 98, $58.

This brilliant analysis of the Waqf al-Haramayn in Ottoman Algiers focuses on the one hundred and seventy years stretching from the latter decades of the seventeenth century to the French army's brutal assault on the capital city in the summer of 1830. The study's chronological limits are determined largely by the available documentation and by the fact that, while there are indications of the foundation's existence as early as the 1620s and 1630s, the institution did not come into its own until the eighteenth century. Indeed, one of the major points Hoexter makes is that the growth and development of the Algerian Waqf al-Haramayn, of the city of Algiers, and of the Turkish deylical state were intimately inter-connected processes. The author emphasizes the following two lines of inquiry through. out her study: first, the interplay between the meticulous laws laid down by Muslim jurists for the establishment and regulation of endowments and the actual manner in which these laws were applied within the larger context of the changing fabric of urban life in Algiers; and second, the conceptual issues that this particular case raises regarding scholarly investigations of large public foundations both in Islam and in the Ottoman Empire generally. Significantly, during the Algerian Haramayn's formative stage at the end of the seventeenth century, the creation of a large foundation, consciously patterned on its imperial counterpart, was directly tied to concerted attempts by Algiers' local rulers to forge an autonomous existence free from undue political interference by their masters in Istanbul.

In her scrupulous investigation of the management of properties, a contested issue in the study of waqf foundations, Hoexter offers a new interpretation of the "managerial policy" that characterized the Haramayn in Algiers (p. 141). Rather than disinterest or outright neglect by waqf administrators, on the one hand, or overly rigid application of the laws governing foundations, on the other, the author detects a "constant dialogue" between the [subset]ulama[contains]s interpretation of the letter of the law and the changing needs of the community at any given moment in time.

Hoexter's concluding chapter, devoted to the Haramayn and the Algerian...