Law in the Emirate of Bukhara: Land, Courts and Non-Muslims

When a Bukharan village divided up land for irrigation around 1900, each farmer with a pair of oxen was handed a wooden plate. All the plates went into a khalat, the long quilted robe, and a man with no stake in the result pulled them out one at a time to decide who got which strip. The Danish explorer Ole Olufsen described the system in his 1911 book. In the same passage he dropped a line that tells you more about the emirate than any lottery: on buying land and owning it, he said, "there are no written laws".

He was half right. The emirate had plenty of law, just not the kind a European expected to find in a statute book.

Sharia, the great judge and the man with the whip

The emirate ran on Hanafi Islamic law, applied by qazis (judges) who in Bukhara often held court in their own homes. According to Paolo Sartori's study of the courts, a qazi's house typically had two rooms: one for the judge and his scribes, one for the mufti who drafted legal opinions and deeds.

At the top sat the qazi-kalan, the "great judge". Olufsen describes him as a kind of minister of justice, religious affairs and education rolled into one, who could ride into the emir's palace like the highest officials and "may cast everybody into prison". Below him was the rais, the official most ordinary Bukharans actually feared. He checked weights and measures, made sure coins weren't clipped, and stopped men in the bazaar to test whether they knew their prayers. Punishment was a fine or a flogging, on the spot.

Out in the provinces, each beg (governor) punished "as it suits him and his Kasis", in Olufsen's words. The one limit was at the top: the death penalty and the harshest sentences needed the emir's order. Capital punishment outlived the emirate by generations, and Uzbekistan abolished executions only in 2008. The prison at the far end of that chain still stands a short walk from the Ark; our piece on the Zindan covers what's documented about it and what's legend.

Three kinds of land, and a fourth that paid nothing

Historians usually sort Bukharan land into three legal types. Amlak was state land. Mulk was privately held. Waqf was land endowed for religious purposes, its income going to mosques and madrasahs.

Neat on paper. Florian Schwarz titled his 2010 article on the subject "Contested grounds", which is the better guide. Even Olufsen's list doesn't match: he sorted arable land by tax, from a one-tenth tithe to 20–50% of the harvest on land granted to officials, and filed waqf under public land.

Mulk is where it gets slippery. Alexander Morrison, summarising Soviet scholars' work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents, lists three kinds: mulk that paid the normal land tax (kharaj) of about a fifth, mulk that paid half that, and mulk-i hurr-i khalis, which paid nothing at all. He warns that nobody is sure those categories still meant the same thing by the nineteenth century. Our view: "private property" is the wrong translation for mulk. "Land whose tax status was worth arguing about" is closer.

Water had its own officials

In an oasis, water mattered more than land. Canals were run by the mirab, the water master, with a mirab-bashi over the bigger feeder canals. A 2025 study in Environmental Research Letters describes the pre-Russian arrangement plainly: water-user communities elected these men and paid them, and how much depended on how satisfied the farmers were with the service. At village level Olufsen saw an arik-aksakal (canal elder) deciding which fields got water and which lay fallow.

Russian rule cut the tie between a mirab's pay and the farmers' opinion of him. But not in Bukhara itself.

1868: one valley, two legal systems

When Russia took Samarkand from the emirate in 1868, the Zarafshan valley was split. Upstream, Samarkand became part of Russian Turkestan. Downstream, Bukhara became a protectorate that kept its own courts and taxes (our history of the emirate covers the treaties).

On the Turkestan side, Governor-General Konstantin von Kaufman kept Islamic courts for the settled population and customary law (adat) courts for nomads. He didn't leave them untouched, though. Under the Provisional Statute of 1867, a qazi was elected every three years by an assembly representing fifty households and confirmed by the Russian governor. Corporal and capital punishment were taken away from these courts, fines were capped at 300 roubles and prison terms at eighteen months, and a dissatisfied party could appeal to a Russian court.

Then came the renaming. The 1886 Statute for the Administration of Turkestan replaced the term "qazi court" with narodnyi sud, "people's court". Otherwise, as Sartori notes, it changed very little. Same judges, same Hanafi law, new label.

Taxes changed faster. Morrison found an official's register showing that by 1871, in parts of the Russian-held valley, kharaj was being charged at a fifth of the crop on mulk and amlak land alike. Samarkand mulk owners protested that "none of our rulers" had interfered before. The Russian official dismissed them as rich men who'd dodged their share.

Water went the same way. Kaufman's administration removed most of the elected water managers and appointed irrigation staff from Tashkent. Elections survived on paper, according to the 2025 study, but in practice they became appointments, and in some accounts the posts were sold. A mirab who no longer answered to the farmers had little reason to satisfy them.

The rules for Jews and Hindus

Jews in the emirate lived as dhimmis: protected, allowed their own religion, and subject to rules meant to mark them out. The list differs by source, so here's what each says.

Olufsen, who was in Bukhara in the late 1890s and published in 1911, saw Jews in single-colour robes "with a string round their waists and a small black fur-cap". He says they couldn't ride in the streets of Bukhara or most towns (in the oasis villages only on a female donkey), though they could in Karshi. He estimated about 4,000 Jews in the emirate.
Dilnoza Rajabova, working from archive documents (a paper given at the CESS conference in 2024), describes men tying their waists with rope, women wearing noticeable veils over their paranjas, a ban on riding horses, and bans on building new synagogues or repairing old ones.
Igor Kotler, in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, adds a special tax, a sign on clothing, a ban on buying horses from Muslims, and the rule that Jewish shops sat one step lower than Muslim ones.

Some popular accounts add a ban on silk; we couldn't find that in the sources above. The donkey rule is real, though: Olufsen says that in the villages of the Bukhara oasis Jews could ride only a female donkey.

Olufsen says Bukhara's small Hindu community of moneylenders faced near-identical rules, down to the twisted string. He also recorded one thing the protectorate changed: Russian protection had ended the belief that any Bukharan could beat a Jew or "hang him by the string" he was forced to wear.

The chala: when leaving Islam was a crime

The harshest legal fact for Bukhara's Jews wasn't about clothes. From the middle of the eighteenth century, according to Kotler, mass forced conversions to Islam began, and they continued into the nineteenth. Once converted, a person was legally Muslim. Returning to Judaism openly would have been apostasy under the emirate's law.

So many didn't return openly. The converts and their descendants, called chala (roughly "half" or "incomplete"), lived outwardly as Muslims while keeping some Jewish practice at home. Kotler puts them at several hundred families by the early twentieth century.

What freed them was a paperwork change. In the 1920s the Soviet state began classifying people by nationality rather than religion, and many chala registered as Jews again. Others chose to stay Uzbek or Tajik and Muslim. A 2025 Central Asian Survey article draws on interviews with chala-descended families in Tajikistan. For the community's wider story and the quarter you can still walk through, see Bukhara's Jewish quarter.

A note on "Timur's code"

The Tuzukat-i Timuri, the "Institutes of Timur", is often quoted as the conqueror's own rules. It first surfaces at Shah Jahan's Mughal court in the 1630s (1636 and 1637 are both given), presented by Abu Talib Husayni as a translation of a Turkic original nobody has ever found. Andican's 2017 review notes that Timurid historians generally don't treat it as a primary source. Whatever it is, it isn't Timur's law code.

If you're in Bukhara

The Zindan's official name is the Museum of the History of Law and the Court System of Bukhara. Its chains and dioramas show only the punishment end of the system. The rest (the qazi's two-room house, the land deeds, the elected mirab, the plates in a robe) left no building behind, only Olufsen's pages and archives historians are still reading.

Sources

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.