Yossef Rapoport, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 137 pages.

Through a very meticulous reading in numerous Arabic sources, Yossef Rapoport, author of Marriage, Money, and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society, challenges the commonplace assumption that women in medieval Arabic society were subordinated to male domination. Drawing from the rich Arabic literature written during the Mamluk period (1250-1517), he not only skillfully depicts marital life in Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem, but also reveals novel facts that might undermine common stereotypes of women in medieval Islamic society. For example, not only was there a high rate (about 30 percent) of divorce in these three Mamluk urban societies, but women were also single-handedly capable of providing for themselves and their children. Elite women were economically independent, thanks to the generous dowries they received upon marriage, while lower-class women worked for their living, particularly in the textile industry. True, “repudiation” (talaq) was a unilateral privilege reserved for the husband only; however, there were many cases of consensual separation (khul`).

The women in this book do not appear as passive and submissive at all. Quite the contrary, some put a price on various aspects of their relationships with their husbands, including a “bed-fee” (haqq al-firashah), while others appeared before the court to complain about their husbands’ misbehavior. More often than not, the court sided with them by ordering the husbands to be flogged or thrown into jail. All of these facts, carefully supported by dozens of textual proofs and cautiously analyzed and contextualized, enable the reader to catch a glimpse of the intimate lives of medieval Muslim families, a glimpse that is free of prejudice and self-righteousness.

The author provides a very useful survey of Mamluk-period authors (pp. 8-11), with a special focus on the fifteenth-century Cairene historian Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Rahman al-Sakhawi (d. 1497), whose centennial biographical dictionary contains over 1,000 entries for contemporary women (pp. 82-88). Rapoport also bases his research on legal sources (manuals and fatawa, responsa) and documents from the only extant Mamluk-period court archive: the fourteenth-century archive from the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem.

The book comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the importance of dowries in all echelons of Mamluk society, but especially in the upper class. Although Islamic law does not obligate the bride’s natal family to provide her with a dowry, it is evident that dowries were a common practice. Far more substantial than the “marriage gift” (sadaq) a groom is obliged to give his bride according to Islamic law, dowries were perceived as a premortem inheritance given to the daughter and remained her exclusive property throughout her marriage. Women were also engaged in such financial activities as loaning money. A striking example of female financial enterprise appears in a case brought to a Cairene jurist in which women of means established a communal fund that lent money to each of its members in turn (p. 25).

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