Hoda Moftah El Saadi is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilization at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and a co-founder of the Woman and Memory Forum. She received both her BA and MA from the American University in Cairo and her PhD from Cairo University in Islamic History. Her field of specialization is early and medieval Islamic history.
Abstract: This paper attempts to study Muslim marriages in Islamic societies against specific historical and cultural backgrounds, focusing on the marriage practices in Egypt during Mamluk age from the 13th to the 16th century. The construction of marital relations can be found in the writings of Muslim jurists but also in the complicated social relationship of gender, that is “the product of the historical development of human experience, a relationship that changes evolves and adapts in rhythm with a changing society”. The problem is that in modern time, when it comes to marriage and divorce, people tend to focus on what the law says about the matter, ignoring the historical context and the social reality that changed from one period to another and from one geographical location to another. In order to understand a legal tradition pertaining to marriage practices, we have to understand the context in which it was produced. We have to contextualize Islamic legal tradition, as it did not appear in a vacuum but in a context bound to a specific time and space. The chapter examines rulings concerning marriage practices and marital relations in Islamic law literature (fiqh) and in daily lived experience as recorded in historical chronicles and documents. It investigates a variety of legal and historical sources to determine whether or not the rulings reflect the lived realities of men and women in marital relations, thereby furthering our understanding of the complexity of fiqh and how it intersects with social, political and economic factors.
The lived experience of the law has been studied recently by a number of scholars. Most of this kind of research focuses on the Ottoman Empire because of the wealth of court records that survive from this period. Yet very few studies focused on the topic in the pre-Ottoman period because of the complete absence of the court archives. So, this study is an attempt to fill that gap and contribute to our understanding of medieval Islamic socio-legal history with a specific focus on marriage practices and marital relations.
