Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt by Kenneth M. Cuno (review)

In Modernizing Marriage, Kenneth M. Cuno addresses how changes in the Egyptian legal system helped transformed conceptions of marriage and the family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This detailed history connects profound social and cultural shifts with their legal underpinnings and, in doing so, argues that any assumption that women have been consistently subordinated by Islamic marriage laws does not take into account earlier forms of family and lineage. As Cuno relates Egyptian society’s movement away from polygyny and toward monogamy, he additionally makes the case that these changes were not simply derived from European colonialism but should be understood in connection to shifting Ottoman policies, transnational pathways of influence at work throughout North Africa, and the growth of Egypt’s intelligentsia.

Cuno examines the Ottoman roots of early nineteenth-century marriage and family law, how those policies were put into practice, and the subsequent legal changes that coincided with shifting social and cultural ideas about marriage. From there, he carefully examines the codification of marriage and divorce and the complex roots of those new policies, questioning in the end how beneficial the apparent modernization of marriage was for Egyptian women.

Modernizing Marriage usefully builds on the work of other prominent scholars of Egyptian women’s history, including that of Margot Badran, Beth Baron, and Lisa Pollard. Where their works have largely relied on periodicals and memoirs, Cuno digs into the specifics of Egyptian legal sources and adds new depth to how we think about the context of changing family behaviors. When examining shifts in family formation, for instance, Cuno looks to Khedive Abbas II’s clandestine polygyny in 1900 as an example. Where Abbas’s predecessors openly took multiple wives, Cuno attributes the secrecy regarding the viceroyal’s family to an altered political scene where the abolition of slavery in Egypt required the alteration of family form. Cuno explains that Abbas’s polygyny appeared not only out of sync with changing ideas about the importance of the conjugal family but also lacked the political relevance it once held.

Among Cuno’s most significant contributions is his analysis of Qadri’s Code. He charts a path of influence that traveled from France, through Algeria, and then into Egypt and other Muslim-majority countries, examining the widespread appeal of the code of personal status published by Muhammad Qadri Pasha. Cuno explains that the concise and easy to reference nature of Qadri’s Code made it so authoritative that it remains a commonly used text today. In it, Qadri offered a streamlined version of the Hanafi school of Sunni law, articulating a personal status code that lacked the debates and discussions common to other Sunni legal texts. In doing so, Qadri provided a version of Sharia law that was easier to adapt to a modern legal system.

The ensuing application of Qadri’s Code helped ensure that family law became deeply tied to religion and placed a rigid “maintenance-obedience” relationship—defined by the “house of obedience”—at the center of the state’s prescribed marriage ideal. Cuno explains that the “house of obedience” created a system that required women to remain within the home and obey their husbands in exchange for their husband’s maintenance of her and the family’s basic needs. Where divorce had previously been more accessible to women left neglected by their husbands, the “house of obedience” made it far more difficult. Additionally, Cuno argues that the use of Qadri’s Code made this stringent approach to marriage appear as though it was based on centuries-old Sunni law even though it was in fact a modern invention unprecedented in local custom or Muslim family law.

Modernizing Marriage leaves certain questions open where other historians might now make their own interventions. For instance, if social changes took place in Egypt because of alterations in Ottoman policy, then what influenced...