"Off the Straight Path": Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (review)

In "Off the Straight Path": Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo, Elyse Semerdjian looks at "moral deviancy" (xxiii) in this Syrian town in the early modern period. Framing her enquiry of zina, or "illicit sex," broadly understood to include prostitution and rape as well as adultery, Semerdjian raises the issue of the disjuncture between shari'a and the practice of law in Aleppo's Ottoman courts. She argues that the qadi's (Muslim judge's) departure from doctrine should not be mistaken for the arbitrariness of Max Weber's kadijustiz. Instead, she insists that the practices of Ottoman Aleppo's courts stand as evidence of a dynamic and flexible Islamic law that accommodated local traditions and agency. Whereas doctrinal accommodation was made possible in Aleppo thanks to a variety of principles (such as istihsan or "preferred result"), legal loopholes, and the incorporation of customary law, practical accommodation took place because the city's guilds as well as its various quarters were the vehicles for adjudication, as far as issues of public morality were concerned. As such the author tackles her thesis by looking at doctrine as well as practiced law: In the first instance, she conducts, following Fatima Mernissi, "an archaeology" (5) of zina that shows, pace contemporary Islamist claims, that Islam has always been open to change. In the second instance, she examines the records of Aleppo's Ottoman courts in order to demonstrate the local nature and agency of their justice.

The book is comprised of two parts in five chapters as well as an Introduction, a Conclusion, and an Epilogue. In addition, it includes Notes, a Bibliography, and an Index. Part 1 deals with "Zina Discourses." Chapter 1 looks at discussions of zina in the Qur'an, Hadith, and some Hanafi texts. Chapter 2 skips through to the early Ottoman period and looks at imperial views of zina as expressed in the kanunnames (law codes) of Sultan Selim I and Suleiman, as well as the fatwas of Ebu Su'ud. Semerdjian argues that the early Ottoman state introduced important changes to Islamic law on zina, including the commutation of the mandated punishment for hadd crimes (defined as those having fixed punishments in the shari'a) into a system of fines.

Having demonstrated flexibility on the side of legal doctrine—both divine and imperial—the book moves on to examine "Law in Practice" in Aleppo. Chapter 3, "People and Court: Policing Public Morality in the Streets of Aleppo," argues for a pattern of public policing of illicit behavior at the hands of city quarters and guilds. Chapter 4, "Prostitutes, Soldiers, and the People: Monitoring Morality through Customary Law," looks at prostitution and argues that Aleppo's courts employed a number of strategies, such as resorting to euphemisms in prosecuting prostitution, which made for less draconian and more flexible judgments. The fifth and last chapter, "In Harm's Way: Domestic Violence and Rape in the Shari'a Courts of Aleppo," analyzes court cases involving physical darar (violence), including rape.

Semerdjian casts a wide net in pursuing her subject. Her primary sources include the Qur'an, Hadith, a number of Hanafi works, fatwas, and two kanunnames, as well as samples from thirty-three sijill (volumes), selected one per decade covering the period from 1507 to 1866. Her methodological and historiographic forays are equally ambitious.

Yet all in all the work is disappointing. At the most basic level, the book suffers from careless editing and stilted writing. The word madhahab for (legal) schools appears instead of the correct madhahib (15); a two-paragraph discussion of prostitution that appears in Chapter 1 (14 - 5) is repeated almost verbatim in Chapter 4 (99 - 100); and sentences such as "Her explicit description of the rape included a description of the rape in her own words" (149 - 50) appear throughout the work. Moreover, Semerdjian often fails to historicize her categories and often paraphrases rather than analyzes...