The pledged in the Court Registers of Istanbul

Some practices have emerged in order to move the debt relationship, which is an integral part of human relations, to a secure ground. One of them, the pledge transaction, enables the debt to be secured by a property. The boundaries of the pledge transaction have been drawn by Islamic law by determining the rules and conditions. Both classical and contemporary sources of Islamic law have examined the nature, elements, conditions, consequences and related issues of the pledge contract in detail. However, these studies are mostly theoretical. Considering that the rules and provisions set forth by Islamic law regulate the functioning of human life, it is open to research how the pledge agreement, which has access to detailed theoretical information, finds a response in practice. In this context, the court records of the Ottoman judicial system, which was founded on the views of Islamic law in general and the Hanafi madhhab in particular, provide an opportunity to observe the function of the contract of pledge. In the first part of this study, which consists of two parts, the mentioned rules and conditions are explained in a concise manner by comparing the views of Hanafi, Mālikī, Shāfi'ī and Hanbalī sects. In the second part, the compliance of the examples taken from the eighteenth century Istanbul Kadi Registers with the issues in the first part is analyzed. In this way, the extent to which the theoretical knowledge of the contract of pledge and the Ottoman practice based on the Hanafi madhhab are compatible with each other is revealed.