Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society

Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society PDF Author: Yossef Rapoport
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139444816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
High rates of divorce, often taken to be a modern and western phenomenon, were also typical of medieval Islamic societies. By pitting these high rates of divorce against the Islamic ideal of marriage,Yossef Rapoport radically challenges usual assumptions about the legal inferiority of Muslim women and their economic dependence on men. He argues that marriages in late medieval Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem had little in common with the patriarchal models advocated by jurists and moralists. The transmission of dowries, women's access to waged labour, and the strict separation of property between spouses made divorce easy and normative, initiated by wives as often as by their husbands. This carefully researched work of social history is interwoven with intimate accounts of individual medieval lives, making for a truly compelling read. It will be of interest to scholars of all disciplines concerned with the history of women and gender in Islam.

Majnūn

Majnūn PDF Author: Michael Walters Dols
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
This is a study of madness in the medieval Islamic world. Using a wide variety of sources--historical, literary, and art--the late Michael Dols explores beliefs about madness in Islamic society and examines attitudes towards individuals afflicted by mental illness or disability. The book demonstrates the links between Christian and Muslim medical beliefs and practices, and traces the influence of certain Christian beliefs, such as miracle-working, on Islamic practices. It breaks new ground in analyzing the notions of the romantic fool, the wise fool, and the holy fool in medieval Islam within the framework of perceptions of mental illness. It shows that the madman was not regarded as a pariah, an outcast, or a scapegoat. This is a comprehensive and original work, with insights into magic, medicine, and religion that combine to broaden our understanding of medieval Islamic society.

Damascus Life 1480-1500

Damascus Life 1480-1500 PDF Author: Boaz Shoshan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789004413252
Category : Arabs
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In Damascus Life 1480-1500: A Report of a Local Notary, Boaz Shoshan writes the microhistory of Ibn Ṭawq, a lower middle class clerk who worked in the city ́s legal system on the eve of the Ottoman conquest, based on his unique diary.

Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam

Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam PDF Author: Kecia Ali
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674059174
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
What did it mean to be a wife, woman, or slave in a society in which a land-owning woman was forbidden to lay with her male slave but the same slave might be allowed to take concubines? Jurists of the nascent Maliki, Hanafi, and Shafi‘i legal schools frequently compared marriage to purchase and divorce to manumission. Juggling scripture, precedent, and custom on one hand, and the requirements of logical consistency on the other, legal scholars engaged in vigorous debate. The emerging consensus demonstrated a self-perpetuating analogy between a husband’s status as master and a wife’s as slave, even as jurists insisted on the dignity of free women and, increasingly, the masculine rights of enslaved husbands. Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam presents the first systematic analysis of how these jurists conceptualized marriage—its rights and obligations—using the same rhetoric of ownership used to describe slavery. Kecia Ali explores parallels between marriage and concubinage that legitimized sex and legitimated offspring using eighth- through tenth-century legal texts. As the jurists discussed claims spouses could make on each other—including dower, sex, obedience, and companionship–they returned repeatedly to issues of legal status: wife and concubine, slave and free, male and female. Complementing the growing body of scholarship on Islamic marital and family law, Ali boldly contributes to the ongoing debates over feminism, sexuality, and reform in Islam.

Advancing the Legal Status of Women in Islamic Law

Advancing the Legal Status of Women in Islamic Law PDF Author: Mona Samadi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004446958
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Mona Samadi examines the sources of gender differences within the Islamic legal tradition and describes how Islamic law entitles individuals to justice according to their status, abilities and potential. In the case of men and women's capabilities, the underlying principle is that they are entitled to the same rights, as long as their capabilities are the same. In the legal construction of women's status, women have been prescribed lacking the same abilities and capabilities as men. As such, their status and rights differ, justifying men to be the maintainers of women. By presenting the historical development of women's status and how women's legal status is debated in contemporary Muslim societies, Mona Samadi convincingly provides various methods for facilitating change within the Islamic legal theory framework.

Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085)

Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085) PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004423877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085) offers an exciting series of essays by leading scholars in Hispanic Studies from across North America and Europe. At its heart is the Reconquista, without doubt the most important and enduring theme of Iberian historiography of the Middle Ages. The innovative studies collected herein, which treat a diverse array of subjects via forensic analyses of charters, chronicles and coins, shed new light on crucial aspects of medieval Iberian socio-economic, political and cultural history. The result is a collection of essays which marks a decisive and bold turning of the page in Iberian medieval studies, as the reality and ideal of Reconquest come under hitherto unparalleled scrutiny. Contributors are Graham Barrett, Jeffrey Bowman, Alberto Canto, Nicola Clarke, Wendy Davies, Julio Escalona, Jonathan Jarrett, Eduardo Manzano Moreno, Iñaki Martín Viso and Lucy K. Pick. See inside the book.

Making Women's Medicine Masculine

Making Women's Medicine Masculine PDF Author: Monica H. Green
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191607355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1353

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Book Description
Making Women's Medicine Masculine challenges the common belief that prior to the eighteenth century men were never involved in any aspect of women's healthcare in Europe. Using sources ranging from the writings of the famous twelfth-century female practitioner, Trota of Salerno, all the way to the great tomes of Renaissance male physicians, and covering both medicine and surgery, this study demonstrates that men slowly established more and more authority in diagnosing and prescribing treatments for women's gynaecological conditions (especially infertility) and even certain obstetrical conditions. Even if their 'hands-on' knowledge of women's bodies was limited by contemporary mores, men were able to establish their increasing authority in this and all branches of medicine due to their greater access to literacy and the knowledge contained in books, whether in Latin or the vernacular. As Monica Green shows, while works written in French, Dutch, English, and Italian were sometimes addressed to women, nevertheless even these were often re-appropriated by men, both by practitioners who treated women and by laymen interested to learn about the 'secrets' of generation. While early in the period women were considered to have authoritative knowledge on women's conditions (hence the widespread influence of the alleged authoress 'Trotula'), by the end of the period to be a woman was no longer an automatic qualification for either understanding or treating the conditions that most commonly afflicted the female sex - with implications of women's exclusion from production of knowledge on their own bodies extending to the present day.

Narratives of Dependency

Narratives of Dependency PDF Author: Elke Brüggen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111381919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Given that strong asymmetrical dependencies have shaped human societies throughout history, this kind of social relation has also left its traces in many types of texts. Using written and oral narratives in attempts to reconstruct the history of asymmetrical dependency comes along with various methodological challenges, as the 15 articles in this interdisciplinary volume illustrate. They focus on a wide range of different (factual and fictional) text types, including inscriptions from Egyptian tombs, biblical stories, novels from antiquity, the Middle High German Rolandslied, Ottoman court records, captivity narratives, travelogues, the American gift book The Liberty Bell, and oral narratives by Caribbean Hindu women. Most of the texts discussed in this volume have so far received comparatively little attention in slavery and dependency studies. The volume thus also seeks to broaden the archive of texts that are deemed relevant in research on the histories of asymmetrical dependencies, bringing together perspectives from disciplines such as Egyptology, theology, literary studies, history, and anthropology

Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism

Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism PDF Author: Jeremy P. Brown
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004460942
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each study sheds light on how medieval Jews crafted the commandments out of theretofore underdetermined material. By systematizing, representing, or interrogating the amorphous category of commandment, medieval Jewish authors across both the Islamic and Christian spheres of influence sought to explain, justify, and characterize Israel’s legal system, divine revelation, the cosmos, and even the divine order. This volume correlates bodies of knowledge—such as jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism, and kabbalah—that are normally treated in isolation into a single conversation about a shared constitutional concern.

Islamic Theology, Philosophy and Law

Islamic Theology, Philosophy and Law PDF Author: Birgit Krawietz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110285401
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
A unique collection of studies, the present volume sheds new light on central themes of Ibn Taymiyya's (661/1263-728/1328) and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's (691/1292-751/1350) thought and the relevance of their ideas to diverse Muslim societies. Investigating their positions in Islamic theology, philosophy and law, the contributions discuss a wide range of subjects, e.g. law and order; the divine compulsion of human beings; the eternity of eschatological punishment; the treatment of Sufi terminology; and the proper Islamic attitude towards Christianity. Notably, a section of the book is dedicated to analyzing Ibn Taymiyya's struggle for and against reason as well as his image as a philosopher in contemporary Islamic thought. Several articles present the influential legacy of both thinkers in shaping an Islamic discourse facing the challenges of modernity. This volume will be especially useful for students and scholars of Islamic studies, philosophy, sociology, theology, and history of ideas.