Introduction

This book seeks to make a contribution to the growing fi eld of Mediterranean studies by investigating the history of women, gender, and the law from a transreligious perspective. This is a diffi cult and perhaps counterintuitive undertaking, for questions of women and gender have, since the Enlightenment, served to identify “fundamental” differences among Islamic, Jewish, and Christian communities, and to measure how much more “advanced” Western European societies were than their Middle Eastern counterparts.1 As anybody even remotely familiar with the head-scarf debates in Turkey, France, England, and Germany knows, tensions surrounding issues of women’s rights continue to be cultivated in political discourse. Recent historical scholarship on Muslim women has, to some extent, intervened in these wider political debates, correcting previously held assumptions. In debunking the orientalist view of Islamic women as silent, passive, and repressed, studies of divorce records, notarial acts, pious bequests, marriage contracts, and juridical literature have shown that Muslim women had ample access to property rights, courts, and legal services in the early modern period.2 Many feminist historians claim, in fact, that Ottoman, Andalusian, and Egyptian women’s legal rights were much more extensive than those of their Christian counterparts-both Greek and Latin. Muslim women’s unencumbered ownership of their mahr, or bridewealth,3 and their right to initiate divorce proceedings have been contrasted favorably with Italian women’s conditioned ownership of dotal properties, English wives’ virtually nonexistent legal persona under coverture, and the many obstacles to divorce in Catholic countries.4