(a.) treaty, agreement: 1. In earlier times: See for this, ʿahd ; baḳṭ ; imtiyāzāt .
2. In modern times. We find muʿāhede or muʿāhedet in Ottoman Turkish: moʿāhede , moʿāhedat , in Persian and Urdu.
The Ottoman official term for “treaty” was either muʿāhede, borrowed from the Arabic, or ʿahd-nāme , borrowed from the Persian. At the height of Ottoman power, most treaties constituted one-sided proclamations, phrased as expressions of the Sultan’s own will to grant privileges to foreign states or their subjects. These were generally called ʿahd-nāme [see imtiyāzāt , esp. at iii, 1189 ff.…