Posted on: 1999

By Dr. Hala Fattah

One of the more interesting aspects of history in any part of the world is the shifting reality exhibited in the textual sources of any one period.

It has become obvious over the years that the historian is as prone to making mistakes and misjudgments as any other human observer, and that biases and overt prejudice frequently mar many historical narratives, whether these concern foreign countries or those closer to the historian’s home region. This is because “objective” history is a misnomer; life is riddled with inconsistencies, misunderstandings and flawed perceptions, which routinely show up in the most scrupulous chronicles of times past.

It is therefore interesting to compare and contrast foreign and local sources with regard to one of the most misrepresented sectors of humanity, women. Traditionally, women in the Islamic world have been given short shrift throughout history; along with the peasantry, they are among the least visible members of Arab-Islamic-Ottoman society.

But all this is changing; the new Middle Eastern scholarship is focusing on a number of issues heretofore considered of marginal interest, of which women take pride of place.

One of the most fascinating articles on this subject is that by Dror Ze’vi, entitled “Women in 17th Century Jerusalem: Western and Indigenous Perspectives”. In it, the author compares male European perspectives on women in Jerusalem to those of male Arab-Ottoman perspectives found in Islamic court records.

The first, superficial and frequently tinged with contempt, exhibits a profoundly ignorant view of women and their role in the family and society at large. The second shows women as active — if separate — members of a society in the throes of constant change brought on by the social, economic and political constraints of the moment.

Whereas Europeans note the strict segregation of Ottoman Palestinian life, which secludes women from the company of all but their closest male relatives and women in general, the judges of the Islamic court in Jerusalem record the many instances in which women not only abrogated their marriages (if undertaken without their consent) but also bought, sold and mortgaged property.

Thus, in contrast to European society, in which women had few, if any property rights, Arab Muslim women not only actively engaged in buying and selling land but also employed men as agents to pursue their transactions.

Moreover, women often showed up in court arguing in their own defense, a far cry from the image projected by European travelers of women living in total isolation from social interaction.

Another article supporting Ze’vi’s thesis, albeit from another part of Ottoman Palestine, shows the variety of ways in which women negotiated (and renegotiated) their positions in society. Far from being passive creatures dependent on their menfolk for assistance in everyday affairs, Iris Agmon’s article proves that women in early 20th century Haifa and Jaffa knew how to enhance the relationships that mattered most to them, which were those between them and their children and those between them and their natal families, or the households in which they were born.

Because men were responsible for their children’s upkeep, they exerted more say in the way that children were brought up and eventually married off. But, as Agmon’s research shows, women used subtle strategies to enhance both their children’s and natal families’ socioeconomic benefits, in part because the women in question could be easily divorced.

In that case, a woman’s assets were better protected by her natal family, to which she often returned after being repudiated by her husband. Thus, contrary to the distorted picture painted in Western sources, women in Ottoman Palestine knew how to take advantage of their “secondary” status, partly because they were adept at securing their rights within Islam in open court.

Among the varying methods of how to study the modern Middle East, historians of the Ottoman period have a particularly difficult time choosing between two. According to authorities in the field, these approaches are labeled macro-history and micro-history.

The first deals with broad patterns of social interaction, economic activity and political development. It portrays the history of any one society or people as large interpretations of existing data, using theoretical or quantitative frameworks to study continuity and change over time. The second deals with detailed case studies of people or events that may convey a smaller but necessarily more intimate look at society. It functions as a microcosm of larger trends.

Both approaches figure prominently in the study of Ottoman societies, so it is no surprise to see that they have also been used with regard to the history of women in Ottoman Palestine.

Shar’iyya court records primarily handled Islamic family law but in addition to marriage, divorce and inheritance agreements, they also recorded “sales deeds, commercial partnership contracts, waqf (endowment) deeds and building authorizations”(Ze’vi, 1995).

The problem arises with the interpretations that historians draw out from what are, in essence, legal judgements passed by literate, government-appointed men of the law on both literate as well as illiterate women and men from all classes of society. The biases inherent in the court records are largely those of the educated, legal scholars confronting the “great unwashed” of the small towns and villages of Palestine.

In addition, as Dror Ze’vi’s article on Ottoman Jerusalem shows, court records sometimes fudged the “reality” they presented, so that the facts presented were never completely fool-proof. For instance, there are no records of murders of girls or women in the city whereas the records of such “honor” crimes were plentiful for the rural districts.

Ze’evi surmises this was because the judges were men and tended to believe the stories of the fathers and brothers questioned in “accidental” deaths. Ze’evi believes that, where family honor was concerned, the judges of Islamic courts preferred to “hear no evil”. They did this not only to safeguard the honor of men but of society as well.

Nonetheless, court records provide a slice of reality that is far more complex and vibrant than the macro-histories of the European traveler or the journeying scholar. Among other things, they allow the conscientious historian to ferret out the strategies through which women played key roles in society. By taking the law in their own hands, so to speak, women in Ottoman Jerusalem and elsewhere in Palestine were able to engage actively in commercial pursuits that secured them a form of power and status in society that would otherwise have been denied them.

While many women were not apprised of their rights in Islam, and sometimes cheated of their inheritances by brothers or husbands, the more fortunate did indeed receive redress from Islamic judges, who were, for the most part, fair-minded and cognizant of the law down to the minutest detail.

References :
Ze’vi, Dror, “Women in 17th Century Jerusalem : Western and Indigenous Perspectives”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol.27, no.2, May 1995.

Agmon, Iris, “Women, Class and Gender: Muslim Jaffa and Haifa at the Turn of the 20th Century”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol.30, no.4, November 1998.