In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (review)

In the House of the Law is an important, interesting, and first-rate work. It tells a complex story in a clear style. It is good history by virtue of the originality of its sources and its author’s ability to extract information from them in a way that enables readers to understand the people involved in their own terms and as fellow human beings.

Tucker explores the norms, values, concerns, and conditions that informed the sense of gender and family relations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Damascus, Nablus, Jerusalem, and Ramla. Her principal sources are the legal opinions (fatwas) of three prominent local jurists (muftis) and a sample of the relevant law-court records.

Tucker observes a gendered society in which males and females were conceived to be different, complementary, and unequal. Male and female roles and rights specified in the legal doctrines were applied and developed primarily in the context of relations within the family, particularly in deliberations about marriage (Chapter 2), divorce (Chapter 3), and parental responsibilities (Chapter 4). In keeping with the legal doctrine, as well as local custom, the jurists viewed human sexual desire, both male and female, as powerful, ubiquitous, and natural, and universal marriage as the most effective way of regulating sexuality and thus reproduction (Chapter 5).

The law and its practice privileged male power in family relations, by legitimizing the husband’s authority while insisting on wifely obedience, emphasizing the primacy of male needs and desires in matters of divorce, and highlighting the role of the father as provider, protector, and bestower of lineage, as opposed to the temporariness of the role of the mother as a nurturer of young children. Simultaneously, however, the jurists and courts elaborated and enforced the rights that the law accorded women in order to protect them from abuse and to uphold a model of marriage based on a sense of fairness. Thus, they honored a woman’s right to choose a husband, to enter a marriage as a propertied person, to demand adequate support from her husband, to demand compensation for taking care of the children, to seek protection from coercion, and to negotiate a divorce at her own request. Cognizant of their rights, women kept resorting to the jurists and courts in pursuit of their interests, thereby actively keeping themselves on the legal agenda.

Tucker’s work is as much about the place of Islamic law in everyday life as about the construction of gender roles. Her brief but well-informed (and useful) introductory remarks on Islamic legal traditions demonstrate her competence in dealing with the subject. Her observations in general indicate how the jurists and courts opted “whenever possible, for the broader and more flexible interpretation [of the doctrines that they inherited], for the interpretation that appeared to best serve the interests of justice as well as the needs and stability of their community.” They did so because the Islamic legal traditions allowed it. The jurists and judges were able to choose “an approach that led away from confrontation and conflict and toward harmony in the community as well as the protection of its weaker members” (181–182). Clearly, the interpreters and enforcers of the law were the custodians of a status quo that had inherent inequalities not only in matters of gender but also in those of class and social position. Yet, they fulfilled their task with a sense of responsibility for upholding justice for everyone under God’s law. Otherwise, the weaker members of their community would not have kept returning to them in pursuit of justice.

Tucker’s observations about the flexibility and dynamism of the juridical practice should hardly be surprising. How could any legal discourse or tradition work without an ability to adapt to changing times and different circumstances? Tucker’s work, however, represents a fresh outlook in a field dominated by rigidly essentialist positions, which are...