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  • Agency and Patronage of Muslim Women
  • D. Fairchild Ruggles (bio)
Siobhan Lambert-Hurley. Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. x + 256 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-415-40192-5 (cl).
Maya Shatzmiller. Her Day in Court: Women's Property Rights in Fifteenth-Century Granada. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for Harvard Law School, 2007. viii + 277 pp. ISBN 0-674-02501-6 (cl).
Lucienne Thys-Şenocak. Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. xx + 326 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-7546-3310-1 (cl).

Three recent books examine Muslim women in fifteenth-century Spain, the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, and nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India. They emerge from very different fields of history—legal, architectural, and political—and represent a welcome diversity of methodological approaches to the study of women in Islam. All three take up, to varying degrees, questions of normativity and ideal behavior as reflected in prescriptive literature, and yet all three are grounded in the lives of actual women. Some are elite women whose agency and behavior cannot be regarded as representative of other classes, but there are also the otherwise anonymous figures who appear briefly in the historical record, just long enough to provide the modern historian with a momentary insight into those people who lived in other times and places. Elite women are more likely than ordinary women to have been caught in the net of the chronicles and histories of their own time, and there are many more studies on them. Moreover, with powerful family connections, wealth, and often education, elite women were more likely to leave their own written records (as in the letters exchanged between Ottoman and European royal women and the Bhopal archive studied by Lambert-Hurley) and to commission important public social institutions and monuments (as, for example, in the case of Ottoman, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Mughal female patrons).1 The latter were often funded by a charitable endowment (called a waqf) outlined by a foundation document that specified the source of income that supported the institution as well as the services it would provide and the salaries to be paid to staff. Elite women merit study, therefore, not only because of their [End Page 203] unique impact as wealthy and powerful actors, but also because their actions affected ordinary men and women. In contrast, the study of ordinary women looks at people who did not enjoy extraordinary wealth and did not benefit from exceptionalism. The lives of such women were guided by cultural expectations and the laws guiding inheritance, property, majority status, and divorce. The books by Shatzmiller, Lambert-Hurley, and Thys-Şenocak provide windows onto women at all ranks of society.

Shatzmiller—whose previous historical work focused on the Merinid dynasty of Morocco (1196–1465)—has produced an engaging study that examines the laws and practices pertaining to property rights of Andalusian women in the period between 1421 and 1496. The Nasrids of al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) belonged to the same western Mediterranean orbit as the Merinids, and she specifically justifies her selection of Granada, the Nasrid capital, for having "a judicially obsessed and litigiously minded populace" in which "legal awareness had permeated the fabric of society" (5). There were a great many court cases in al-Andalus in which laws were tested by the particularities of actual practice. Many cases were collected, edited, and summarized by the sixteenth-century scholar Ahmad b. Yahya al-Wansharisi, whose collection provides the primary evidence for Shatzmiller's analysis. Although women (and non-elites) are largely absent from Andalusian political histories, case law provides a window onto a much more diverse public. Fortunately for the study of gender, not only men but also women went to court or engaged agents to instigate proceedings for them. In Shatzmiller's corpus, women appeared in 95 percent of the cases, albeit filtered through the conventions of court scribes. Typically, these are not women with access to the heights of political power but ordinary women suing over breach of contract, infringement on property rights, to acquire inheritance or dowry due to them, or to disassociate themselves from a bad husband. Historians of gender...

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