Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt

5. Virginity, Honor, and Premarital Defloration

99 5 Virginity, Honor, and Premarital Defloration On the night of 24 June 1863, Alexandrian merchant Muhammad Harun claimed that his newly wedded wife, Asma, was not a virgin on their wedding night. He also concealed the “evidence” of her virginity—her blood-stained garments. Her mother and maternal uncle hastened to contact authorities. A hakima who examined her at the police station confirmed that Asma had been deflowered only twelve hours previously, that is, on her wedding night. Muhammad Harun admitted he had lied to take revenge on her mother for a loan she had denied him. This admission came too late, however, as the rumor of Asma’s alleged promiscuity had already spread. Consequently, she and her relatives demanded that Muhammad Harun be punished and Asma’s reputation (sharaf) restored. According to article 2, chapter 2 of the Sultanic Code, Muhammad was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for violating a person’s honor.1 The focus of this chapter will be premarital defloration, as presented in precolonial police, council, and shari‘a courts. The legal procedure normally included a medical examination (see chapter 2), a police investigation, a shari‘a procedure, and a council ruling. Defloration cases were about 0.5 percent of the cases handled by the Supreme Council of Adjudication. They were mostly filed by women’s guardians or closest kin or, in cases involving domestic servants, by their employers; the rest were filed by the young women themselves. Some of them asked for the assailant to be punished, and others asked to have the woman punished for disobedience and unruly behavior. I use Asma’s case, as well as cases of premarital defloration, to question how different notions of honor, virginity, and defloration were transforming through everyday interactions between the legal system and individual litigants. As in previous chapters, my argument here is that these sites are where modern state power was constituted. 100 | Policing Egyptian Women What Is “Honor”? Common in the literature of Middle East history and anthropology is a gendered distinction between sharaf, a man’s honor gained through his actions, and ‘ird, a woman’s honor as manifested through her (real or alleged) sexual conduct, which also bears on her family’s reputation.2 This distinction is useful for understanding social regulation of women in precolonial Egypt. It is not sufficient, however, to understand what honor meant to policemen, council members, or individual litigants. It was certainly not a coherent concept but rather one that various individuals and institutions interpreted somewhat differently. As a starting point, I prefer to see honor as an organizing concept, a form of cultural capital that helps define a person’s status. Honor operates as a link between the individual and the community and a moral framework for behavior, and it provides a basis for acceptance in collective life. Because social standing depends on public recognition, an offense against one’s honor threatens not only an individual’s good name but the very foundational rules of social life. Restoring honor involves reclaiming public recognition that has been wrongfully denied.3 Ottoman legal practice treated sexual crime as disruptive of social harmony , and it defended the individual against both slanderous talk and sexual acts. Islamic law recognizes damage to one’s reputation mainly in the context of illicit sexual relations. Qadhf is a Qur’anic hadd offense that specifically refers to false accusation of illicit sexual relations (zina). Because zina is one of the gravest offenses, punishable by death, qadhf is considered of similar gravity. In legal practice , other elements of a person’s reputation were relevant as well.4 Leslie Peirce demonstrates how, in sixteenth-century ‘Aintab, people used the shari‘a court to clear their reputation, for example, by claiming they were not fully responsible for the actions that compromised their honor.5 As shown in chapter 1, Tanzimat Codes, beginning from the 1839 Gülhane Edict, included new concepts that were integrated into Ottoman legal tradition and sometimes transformed in the process. Whether Ottoman concepts in Enlightenment wording or Enlightenment concepts couched in Islamic-Ottoman rhetoric, these codes were introducing new concepts to Ottoman legal life. The most notable innovation was the nominal equality of all Ottoman subjects that departed, in its spirit, from religion-based distinctions inherent to Islamic and Ottoman legal practice. The Gülhane Edict, and the later 1840 and 1851 Ottoman Virginity, Honor, and Premarital Defloration | 101 Codes...