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Kenneth M. Cuno . Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt . Syracuse : Syracuse University Press , 2015. xxi + 305 pages, footnotes, select bibliography, index. Cloth US$39.95. ISBN 978-0-8156-3392-1 .
Modernizing Marriage examines nineteenth-century socioeconomic, political, and ideological changes that set the stage for codification of Egyptian family law. A wealth of sources, including journals, census records, and juridical texts, allow comparison between ideological constructions of social norms about marriage and actual behaviors. Significantly, Kenneth Cuno delineates the ways in which evolving ideology about family and marriage practices melded precolonial Muslim thought with evolving nineteenth-century European ideals to create something uniquely modern and Egyptian.
When the Ottoman Khedive Tewfiq committed to monogamous marriage, he was responding to both structural and ideological changes in the region. These included obsolescence of the old harem structure and the equation of monogamy with modernity and enlightenment. The move away from polygyny was significant enough that when Tewfiq's successor, Abbas II, decided to marry a second wife, he did so surreptitiously, not with the pomp and circumstance of generations past. Monogamous marriage in the ruling family both modeled and responded to a broader shift in marriage patterns in Egypt (43).
Such shifts correlated with Egyptian elites' debates on issues such as polygyny, the minimum marriage age, and women's concealment before marriage. Late nineteenth-century census figures and court registers document decreasing polygyny rates, increasing marriage age for men and women, and a decrease in joint households (62-66, 71). These statistics, together...