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Islamic Studies
For years, what has animated the study of the Islamic law of marriage and divorce has been a focus on the state of Muslim women today. How refreshing, therefore, to find a study of the topic that takes a different starting point, one that seeks to understand the ways that premodern Muslim jurists constructed notions of family, femininity, and masculinity. While certainly aware of modern debates, Kecia Ali argues that scholars have not fully understood the dynamics that created premodern legal discourses in the first place. Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam is therefore not only an exemplary study of Islamic law in the formative period, but it also sets the stage for a new sort of feminist inquiry into the past.
Despite the title, Ali's focus is squarely on the institution of marriage and divorce; she uses aspects of slave law only as a foil for understanding the ways that jurists conceived of marriage. As she clearly indicates, she is not trying to reconstruct what marriage was actually like for Muslim men and women of the formative period. Rather, her quarry is a thorough understanding of the imaginary worlds of the Muslim scholar and the ways that logic and semantics determined the outcome of arguments. As such, this book serves as an excellent introduction to Islamic law, specifically to the ways that Muslim jurists developed categories and arguments.
Ali opens her book with a useful overview of the formative period in Islamic law, including the problems of relating legal texts to social practice. Immediately, she demonstrates the power that narrative held in the early texts. Al-Shafi(i discusses a Bedouin woman who was brought before the Caliph...