A Wedding Gone Wrong The Rather Worldly Woes of a Rather Wealthy Qādirī Sufi Shaykh. Two 18th Century Documents from the Ottoman Court Records of Ḥamā and Aleppo

A rather intricate legal case took place first in Ḥamā’s and then in Aleppo’s Ottoman Islamic courts around the middle of the 18th century. The setting, the social standing of the individuals involved, and the alleged circumstances of the case all contribute to make clear that this was not just another routine court case. Altogether, the two documents are a good example of the scope and quality of the information preserved in the archives of local courts and they both demonstrate the extent and modes of implementation of Islamic law in a specific Ottoman milieu. The long inventory of personal property in the Aleppo document gives us a good idea of the social status and affluence enjoyed by the plaintiff – a member of the Jīlānī/Qādirī family - and an interesting insight into material culture and what constituted wealth and affluence at the time.

Commodification in multiple registers: Child workers, child consumers, and child labor NGOs in India

Using the term ‘commodity’ as an analytic, this chapter considers the persistence of an iconography of victimhood in dominant representations of child labor in India favored by ‘blanket ban’ NGOs. Drawing on a historiography of child labor legislations, dating from nineteenth century Britain, I explore ‘child labor’ as an affective commodity based on its victimhood imagery, which is readily recognized and consumed in global humanitarian markets today. In the context of NGOs in India, such affective representations also perform a particular NGO identity, one that delineates the “uncompromising” abolitionist stance of blanket ban NGOs, in contrast to the more accommodating stance of the Indian state. The affective logics of ‘child labor’ however, do not square well with the desires and aspirations of “real” working children who are economic agents and desiring subjects in their own right