Her Day in Court: Women's Property Rights in Fifteenth-Century Granada (review)

The author presents a finely honed analysis of women's property rights in the medieval Islamic world based on a series of unique documents originating in the Islamic court of Granada in the late fifteenth century, depicting the transactions of female members of Granadan families over several generations.

Some of Shatzmiller's findings are extraordinary. The notion of explicit rights that women have over reproductive activities, construed as property rights, strikes the modern reader as radically egalitarian. For example, women had the right to choose when to practice birth control, the right not to breastfeed; a right to wages for breastfeeding (as prescribed in the Qur'an); and to receive wages for child rearing. Medical and legal discourse intertwined "providing the female body with a cultural context and social content—hence the body as the subject of property rights" (p. 95). Intercourse with an underage wife could be seen as infringement of her property rights. Consummation was freighted with property relations, a "trigger of property acquisition, for it inaugurated the actual acquisition of the sadaq (dowry)" (p. 95). These were not theoretical rights; they were litigated and upheld by the court.

The heart of the discussion, however, is the analysis of the sadaq, the first and most important portion of a bride's dowry, involving a transfer of property to both the bride and the groom separately. The woman's share was held apart from her husband's property for the duration of the marriage, and there was no legal recourse whereby husbands could force their wives to share their wealth. The sadaq therefore established a "legal and independent channel by which women could acquire property without depriving them of their share in the inheritance" (p. 39).

One has an eerie foreboding reading this book because many of these cases were litigated scant years, even months, before the conquest of Granada and the definitive end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). However, the legal analysis is not limited to Granada, for Shatzmiller's knowledge of the scope and depth of Islamic law is extraordinary, lending a remarkable sense of authenticity to her narrative.

Shatzmiller concludes that ". . . the existence of property rights was central to the conjugal relationship. To propose that these rights mitigated the negative effect of patriarchy is not unreasonable" (p. 197). Her expansive, positive vision of women in late medieval Islamic world is a startling one, given the status of women in many Muslim societies today. Shari'a means different things to different people.