RIBA AS PROCESS: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC READING OF THE 1548 OTTOMAN DECREE ON CASH WAQFS

This article offers an ethnographic reading of Sultan Süleyman’s 1548 decree that lifted the ban on cash waqfs, an Ottoman innovation that allowed individuals to endow money and, through lending, generate returns for charity. Cash waqfs and the controversies surrounding them have become increasingly relevant, as contemporary debates on Islamic banking continue to revolve around the implications of the riba prohibition. Building on this tradition, the article reconsiders the Ottoman case to argue that riba is best approached not as a fixed outcome, whether “interest” or “usury,” but as a collective and embodied process of interpretation and negotiation. Drawing on the decree’s formulation for navigating “the scent of riba” (riba rayihası), the article frames riba prohibition as a process to be managed through ritualized everyday practice rather than calculated into a numerical outcome. An emic approach to riba highlights the ways Ottoman actors engaged with the prohibition, challenging earlier scholarship that collapsed a rich spectrum of financial categories into the single notion of “interest.” The processual approach to riba offered here reframes what is today called “shariah governance,” connecting cash waqfs to modern banking, not necessarily through institutions or law, but through the cultural categories that once animated them.