Mecelle
Ottoman civil code of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
The Mecelle was the civil code of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century. It is the first codification of Sharia law by an Islamic nation.
Title
The Ottoman Turkish title of the code is مجلۀ احكام عدلیە (Mecelle-i Aḥkâm-ı ʿAdliye, lit. 'Code of Judicial Rules'), which derives from the Arabic مجلة الأحكام العدلية (Majallat al-ʾAḥkām al-ʿAdliyya). The Arabic word مجلة (majalla) can mean a law code or a bound text in general.
It has also been transliterated in European languages as Mejelle, Majalla, Medjelle, or Meğelle. In French, it is known as the Medjellé (French pronunciation: [mɛdʒɛle]) or the Code civil ottoman.
History
Enactment
The code was prepared by a commission headed by Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, including a large team of scholars, issued in sixteen volumes (containing 1,851 articles) from 1869 to 1876 and entered into force in the year 1877. In its structure and approach it was clearly influenced by the earlier European codifications. Family law, which had been originally exempted and left in the domain of religious courts, eventually became a part of it in 1917, as the Law of Family Rights. It has been praised as the first successful rendition of Hanafi fiqh into legal civil code comprehensible to the layperson belonging to any religious ideology and not just to Islamic scholars.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mecelle” as ottoman civil code of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as ottoman civil code of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1435600. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1869, 1876, 1877 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mecelle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.