Shari`ah and State Formation: Historical Perspective

This Article focuses on issues of Islamic discrimination against women and asks how centuries of legal practice in Shari\u27ah courts illustrate Muslim societies\u27 regard of the witness of women, women\u27s work, women\u27s seclusion, and the existence of or the need for a private/public divide in a woman\u27s role in society. Furthermore, this Article explores the legal system when Shari\u27ah courts practiced Shari\u27ah law before the coming of the West or the modernization of law in Muslim countries. Were presumptions, such as the nature of women, at the heart of the system, or were rules of evidence the determinants of justice? How closely followed were the conclusions of jurists and mufti\u27s (jurisconsults) when it came to decisions made by qadis (judges)? Finally, how can we define justice in Islamic courts? I deal with these questions through two main inquiries using Shari\u27ah archival records from Egypt and Palestine during the Ottoman period and into the nineteenth century. The first inquiry deals with the public/private divide, which is the usual justification for giving less credibility to the witness of women. The second inquiry will deal with archival evidence regarding the witness of women including their role as expert witnesses

Making muslim babies: Ivf and gamete donation in sunni versus shi’a islam

Medical anthropological research on science, biotechnology, and religion has focused on the “local moral worlds” of men and women as they make difficult decisions regarding their health and the beginnings and endings of human life. This paper focuses on the local moral worlds of infertile Muslims as they attempt to make, in the religiously correct fashion, Muslim babies at in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics in Egypt and Lebanon. As early as 1980, authoritative fatwas issued from Egypt’s famed Al-Azhar University suggested that IVF and similar technologies are permissible as long as they do not involve any form of third-party donation (of sperm, eggs, embryos, or uteruses). Since the late 1990s, however, divergences in opinion over third-party gamete donation have occurred between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, with Iran’s leading ayatollah permitting gamete donation under certain conditions. This Iranian fatwa has had profound implications for the country of Lebanon, where a Shi’ite majority also seeks IVF services. Based on three periods of ethnographic research in Egyptian and Lebanese IVF clinics, this paper explores official and unofficial religious discourses surrounding the practice of IVF and third-party donation in the Muslim world, as well as the gender implications of gamete donation for Muslim marriages

Women in Shari\u27ah Courts: A Historical and Methodological Discussion

This Article focuses on qadis and courts before modern legal reforms with particular emphasis on the life of women and their interaction with the courts. A number of issues will be discussed and points made pertaining to the laws and madhahib [Islamic legal schools] applied in courts, the hierarchies and roles of qadis, and the accessibility of the legal system and knowledge of court procedures to the general public. Court culture, personnel, and record-keeping will also be discussed, as will the philosophy behind the law. The author hopes to illustrate that a viable court system existed before modernization. Although precedent played an important role, and qadis had certain rules to follow, the court system was nonetheless linked to society. Qadis were guided by ‘urf [traditions] familiar to the people they served and judged according to the madhhabs [schools of law] they belonged to as well as their own judgment. The system was flexible and provided an avenue for the public to achieve justice and litigate disputes rather than to enforce a particular philosophy of social laws and norms formulated by the State. Women had clear rights to sue in court. The flexibility of the system allowed women to determine their marriage contracts and the conditions under which they lived. Women also had complete access to divorce a husband they did not want to be with, a far cry from modern law which adopted rules of placing women under the full control of their husbands. Under modern law, with certain exceptions, husbands must agree before divorce takes place. Because pre-modern Shari‘ah court records were not used as precedent for modern Shari‘ah courts, the rights of women, including the right to work and determine their marriage contracts, were lost. By rediscovering these rights through court records, contemporary personal status laws can be questioned. Particularly important here is questioning the religious sanctity that the State gives to personal status laws on the books in Muslim countries today

Shari`ah and State Formation: Historical Perspective

This Article focuses on issues of Islamic discrimination against women and asks how centuries of legal practice in Shari\u27ah courts illustrate Muslim societies\u27 regard of the witness of women, women\u27s work, women\u27s seclusion, and the existence of or the need for a private/public divide in a woman\u27s role in society. Furthermore, this Article explores the legal system when Shari\u27ah courts practiced Shari\u27ah law before the coming of the West or the modernization of law in Muslim countries. Were presumptions, such as the nature of women, at the heart of the system, or were rules of evidence the determinants of justice? How closely followed were the conclusions of jurists and mufti\u27s (jurisconsults) when it came to decisions made by qadis (judges)? Finally, how can we define justice in Islamic courts? I deal with these questions through two main inquiries using Shari\u27ah archival records from Egypt and Palestine during the Ottoman period and into the nineteenth century. The first inquiry deals with the public/private divide, which is the usual justification for giving less credibility to the witness of women. The second inquiry will deal with archival evidence regarding the witness of women including their role as expert witnesses

Note à propos du manuscrit

Éditer ce manuscrit fut pour moi une expérience passionnante. J’ai essayé tout au long du travail de rester aussi près que possible du texte original. Les Mémoires semblent avoir été écrits à diverses époques, et peut-être même, pour certains passages, en diverses langues : le khédive était polyglotte et pourrait avoir utilisé tantôt le français, tantôt l’arabe ou l’anglais. Le style du texte change d’un paragraphe à l’autre ; le récit comporte des sauts brusques d’un sujet à l’autre, qui ont..

Beyond the Exotic Women's Histories in Islamic Societies

"Most research has accepted stereotypical images of Muslim women, treating their outward manifestations, such as veiling, as passive and oppressive. Muslim women have been depicted as different, and by exoticizing (orientalizing) them - or Islamic society in general - "they" have been dealt with outside of general women's history and regarded as having little to contribute to the writing of world history or to the life of their sisters worldwide. By approaching widely used sources with different questions and methodologies, and by using new or little-used material (with much primary research), this book redresses these deficiencies. Scholars revisit and reevaluate scripture and scriptural interpretation; church records involving non-Muslim women of the Arab world; archival court records dating from the present back to the Ottoman period; and the oral and material culture and its written record, including oral history, textbooks, sufi practices, and the politics of dress. By deconstructing the past, these scholars offer fresh perspectives on women's roles and aspirations in Middle East societies."--Jacket.Includes bibliographical references (pages 467-500) and index.Discerning the hand-of-Fatima : an iconological investigation of the role of gender in religious art / Diane Apostolos-Cappadona -- Oral traditions as a source for the study of Muslim women / Valerie J. Hoffman -- Political science without clothes : the politics of dress, or, contesting the spatiality of the state in Egypt / Mamoun Fandy.Mahkama records as a source for women's history / Fatima Zohra Guechi -- And God knows best : the fatwa as a source for the history of gender in the Arab world / Judith E. Tucker -- Gender violence in Ottoman law / Elyse Semerdjian -- Mixed and other courts / Amira El-Azhary Sonbol -- Islamic personal law in American courts / Richard Freeland -- Learning gendered modernity / Lisa Pollard -- The use of textbooks as a source of history for women / Mona Russell -- Sources on the education of Ottoman women in the prime ministerial Ottoman archive for the period of reforms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries / Selçuk Aks̲in Somel -- The history of the discourses on gender and Islamism in contemporary Egypt (1980-1990) / Mervat F. Hatem -- Female patronage of Mamluk architecture in Cairo / Howayda al-Harithy -- Islamic art as a source for the study of women in premodern societies / Sheila S. Blair --^History then, history now : the role of medieval Islamic religio-political sources in shaping the modern debate on gender / Denise A. Spellberg -- The Qur'an and history / Barbara Freyer Stowasser -- Muslim women : public authority, scriptures, and "Islamic law" / Haifaa Khalafallah -- Gendered sources in ethnohistorical research : the study of emigration from a Lebanese village / Patricia Mihaly Nabti -- Individualism and political modernity : devout Catholic women in Aleppo and Lebanon between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries / Bernard Heyberger -- Women, patronage, and charity in Ottoman Istanbul / Fariba Zarinebaf -- Consciousness of self / Randi Deguilhem -- Sources for the study of slave women and concubines in Ottoman Egypt / Nelly Hanna -- Thoughts on women and slavery in the Ottoman era and historical sources / Madeline Zilfi -- Observations on the use of sharia court records as a source of social history / Ramadan al-Khowli --^"Most research has accepted stereotypical images of Muslim women, treating their outward manifestations, such as veiling, as passive and oppressive. Muslim women have been depicted as different, and by exoticizing (orientalizing) them - or Islamic society in general - "they" have been dealt with outside of general women's history and regarded as having little to contribute to the writing of world history or to the life of their sisters worldwide. By approaching widely used sources with different questions and methodologies, and by using new or little-used material (with much primary research), this book redresses these deficiencies. Scholars revisit and reevaluate scripture and scriptural interpretation; church records involving non-Muslim women of the Arab world; archival court records dating from the present back to the Ottoman period; and the oral and material culture and its written record, including oral history, textbooks, sufi practices, and the politics of dress. By deconstructing the past, these scholars offer fresh perspectives on women's roles and aspirations in Middle East societies."--Jacket

Introduction historique

En dépit de la longueur de son règne (1892-1914) et du rôle central qui fut le sien sur le plan politique, social et culturel dans les années qui virent l’Égypte se transformer en une nation moderne, il n’existe à ce jour aucune biographie de Abbas Hilmi (1874-1944), khédive d’Égypte et septième souverain de la dynastie de Muhammad Ali. Et l’on peut s’étonner, comme il le fait lui-même dans l’introduction de ses Mémoires, qu’il soit encore considéré comme un souverain « caché ». Son règne n’e..

Adults and minors in Ottoman Shari'a Courts and modern law

Donated by Klaus Kreise

Panel Four: Gender Legislation and Social Context

Panel Chair: Frank Vogel Mounira Maya Charrad Steady Reforms: Path Dependency Theory and Gender Legislation in Tunisia Adrien Wing The Future of Palestinian Women’s Rights: Lessons from a Half Century of Tunisian Progress Ruth Miller On the Limits of Bodily Integrity: Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective Amira Sonbol Nationality and Citizenship: Women’s Fight for Basic Freedom