The previous chapter demonstrated that the Ottoman Sultan and the governor of Egypt, whom I call the executive authorities, were intimately involved in the day-today administration of justice in Cairo, via the institutions of the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn in Istanbul and the Dīwān al-cĀlī in Cairo. Cairenes chose to involve the executive authorities in their disputes by petitioning the Sultan or by issuing their lawsuit at the governor's Dīwān. I also argued that we might best understand how the different components of Egypt's legal system fit together if we thought not in terms of the different institutions, but in terms of the different personnel and the functions they carried out. The sharīca court was not the only sphere of the qāḍī's activities. There were qāḍīs present at the governor's Dīwān al-cĀlī, and the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn referred cases to the chief qāḍī of Egypt when the facts of the case could not be clearly established with documentation in Istanbul.

I divided the administration of justice into three essential functions: (1) doctrine, that is, the production of the substantive law that was applied; (2) procedure, which determined whether a claim was, legally, true; (3) enforcement of any penalties or actions that a judgment imposed. I am interested in how these different functions were shared between three spheres of power: the juristic, the judicial, and the executive. I argued that procedure lay firmly within the judicial sphere: the correct implementation of procedure was the qāḍī's key responsibility, which he performed within, or on behalf of, all of the formal institutions of justice. I argued that enforcement was shared between the judicial and executive spheres. While the qāḍī imposed penalties and commanded actions in his judgments, his ability to enforce these judgments was limited. The debtor's prison lay under his control, and the minor corporal punishments imposed as taczīr were performed immediately at the court. But beyond this, the qāḍī had no power to enforce a judgment. A successful litigant was issued with a ḥujja confirming their right, but it was up to him or her to enforce it. When coercion was required, litigants relied on the executive authorities to provide it.