Genel Türk Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi

Öz

Cursing, insulting or oath is an attack instrument which has been used among people since ancient times in a state of aggression, with or without reason, regardless of gender. Such words, which we can consider as verbal attacks, were brought to court by the people who were attacked when they passed a certain level and were related to some taboo areas. In the Ottoman Empire, such defamation cases were reflected in the qadi records. The qadi registers/shar'iyya registers, in which all kinds of cases were recorded, are an important source that helps to analyze the socioeconomic structure. In this study, 20 qadi/sharia registers belonging to Amasya between 1750-1800 were examined; however, the data in the kadi registry book numbered 50 and 51 dated between 1761 and 1764, when cases of blasphemy and defamation were relatively high, were examined. In addition that it will be tried to reveal the types of words that contain swearing and insults that can cause a psychological crisis on people and how these are semantically equivalent to the people in Amasya, a provincial city in the light of the data obtained from the qadi registers.
In the second half of the 18th century, Amasya was a sanjak governed by local Ayan families. Amasya was one of the regions where the effects of the turmoil created by the Celali Rebellions, or in other words, the unrest caused by changes dating back to the 16th century, were felt most severely. In the 18th century, the decentralization process as a reflection of the general governance crisis experienced by the Ottoman Empire almost eliminated regional public order and peace, with individual and collective acts of banditry becoming increasingly common in and around Amasya. Many incidents such as murder, assault, theft, robbery, adultery, harassment, rape, blasphemy, and insult were reflected in the Şer’iyye records due to the uncontrollable level of social violence in this environment. As the normality of violence and the worsening conditions of life increased, the frequency of blasphemy and insult cases also increased as in other crime rates. However, the goal here is to provide more explanatory data on the societal structure and prevailing violent atmosphere through the analysis of blasphemy and insult cases beyond numerical comparison and incident detection. Curse, which has been a psychological violence element within society for a long time, not only represents one dimension of violence but also provides clues about the "conceptualization" and "othering" processes that are humiliated, despised, and subject to insult in the social structure. The blasphemy and insult cases in the Amasya Şeriyye records have been evaluated by mentioning not only their individual effects as violence but also their function as a divisive discourse. Nevertheless, these blasphemy and insult cases reflected in the shari'ah records, which are among the main sources of social history, reveal the diversity or shallowness of blasphemy and insult linguistically, as well as the nature of ethnic and religious identities that are transformed into insults socially and the othering processes of societal imagination beyond the punitive measures of blasphemy and insult