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NAKED ANXIETY: BATHHOUSES, NUDITY, AND THE DHIMMĪ WOMAN IN 18TH-CENTURY ALEPPO

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2013

Elyse Semerdjian
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Abstract

In the 18th century, non-Muslims and women crossed social boundaries during a period of increased global consumption, prompting intervention on the part of Ottoman officials. On the imperial level, the sultan promulgated edicts to restrict such crossings, following the path of earlier laws that had regulated public spaces including bathhouses. In Aleppo, a local reflection of these 18th-century trends was increased monitoring of nudity and of contact between Muslims and non-Muslims within the city's bathhouses. Regulations required that bathkeepers provide separate bath sundries for Muslims and non-Muslims and prohibited co-confessional bathing for women in particular. With the assistance of guilds—and to a lesser extent millet representatives—complex bathing schedules for Muslim and non-Muslim women were registered at court to support segregation policies. Jurists discussing modesty requirements for Muslim women declared that non-Muslim (dhimmī) women were to be treated as unrelated men in that they were forbidden to gaze upon a naked Muslim woman. Shariʿa court rulings were constructed along similar lines, indicating that the dhimmī woman was an unstable, liminal social category because in some circumstances her gaze was gendered male. Muslim male elites and local guilds ultimately instituted segregated bathing schedules to protect the purity of Muslim women from the danger posed by the dhimmī female figure.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , November 2013 , pp. 651 - 676
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Middle East Studies Association Conference (2012). For comments on previous drafts of this paper, I thank the History Department at Whitman College, Theresa Alfaro Velcamp, Mériam Belli, Moulouk Berry, Suzanne Morrissey, Jason Pribilsky, Baki Tezcan, Faedah Totah, and Heghnar Watenpaugh; extra gratitude goes out to Dana Sajdi. A special thanks to Guita Hourani at the Lebanese Emigration Research Center at Notre Dame University in Beirut for help in locating an important source. I am indebted to the four anonymous reviewers who provided important guidance and for the editorial interventions of Beth Baron and Sara Pursley.

1 I have greatly benefited from the field of consumption studies and from scholarship on the temporal and ideological connections between clothing and bathing regulations. See Quataert, Donald, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997): 403–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Zilfi, Madeline, “Goods in the Mahalle: Distributional Encounters in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922: An Introduction, ed. Quataert, Donald (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York, 2000), 289Google Scholar. For a more lengthy discussion see Zilfi, Madeline, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 51–57Google Scholar.

2 Many sumptuary regulations were implemented between the 16th and 18th centuries. While sultans could adjust the requirements through edicts, a general guideline was that non-Muslims wore blue or black clothing or red shoes to identify themselves. For more details, see Pearlmann, Moshe, “Ghiyār,” Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 2:1075Google Scholar; Knost, Stefan, “La société dans le fabourg nord d'Alep,” in Les relations entre musulmans et chrétiens dans le Bilad al-Cham, à l'epoque ottoman: Apport des archives des tribunaux religieux des villes: Alep, Beyrouth, Damas, Tripoli. ed. Boisset, L., Sanagustin, F., and Slim, S. (Beirut: IFPO, Université Saint-Joseph, 2004), 130Google Scholar.

3 Two examples of works exploring the intersection of gender and religion in the Ottoman Empire are Madeline Zilfi, Women and Slavery; and Baer, Marc, “Islamic Conversion Narratives of Women: Social Change and Gendered Religious Hierarchy in Early Modern Ottoman Istanbul,” Gender & History 16 (2004): 425–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Baer, “Islamic Conversion Narratives,” 427–28, 435.

5 Anthropologist Victor Turner has described a “liminal being” as one who is “necessarily ambiguous since this condition and these persons elide or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space.” See “Liminality and Community,” in Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 147.

6 Ze'evi discursively analyzes Ottoman definitions of sexuality, including the “one-sex” model of the early modern period, which was retained even after the introduction of the modern European “two-sex” paradigm. Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006), 23–24.

7 See Quataert, “Clothing Laws” and Consumption Studies; and Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 45–95.

8 These ten agreements that sought to regulate bathhouses are mentioned at different points in this article and appeared in the following order in Aleppo's shariʿa court archives: Sijillat al-Mahakam al-Sharʿiyyya (hereafter SMH) 45:73:177 19 Ramadan 1130AH/August 1718; SMH 46:726:1953 15 Dhu al-Qiʿda 1138AH/July 1726; SMH 55:48:162 2 Rajab 1147AH/November 1734; SMH 81:29:74–75, 11 and 12 Jumada I, 1165 AH/March 1752; SMH 94:52:91 28 Jumada II 1175AH/January 1762; SMH 97:52 28 Jumada II, 1175AH/January 1762; SMH 101:265:679 4 Jumada I, 1182AH/September 1768; SMH 113:233:574 17 Rajab 1190AH/September 1776; SMH 143:4:15 30 Shawwal 1208AH/May 1794; SMH 143:86:291 9 Shawwal 1209 AH/April 1795.

9 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 43Google Scholar.

10 This is a term used by Greek Orthodox priest Mikhaʾil Burayk to describe women's moral transgressions in the period under study. See his Tarikh al-Sham: 1720–1782 (Damascus: Dar Qutayba, 1982), 74. Also quoted and discussed in Grehan, James, Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in 18th Century Damascus (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2007), 150Google Scholar.

11 Cohen, Amnon, “The Receding of the Christian Presence in the Holy Land: A 19th Century Sijill in the Light of 16th Century Tahrirs,” in The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th Century: The Common and the Specific in the Historical Experience, ed. Philipp, Thomas (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992), 335Google Scholar.

12 See Zilfi, Women and Slavery; and Quataert, Consumption Studies.

13 Zilfi discusses these rulings in detail and notes an absence of documentation on such matters for earlier periods. Women and Slavery, 69; see her discussion of Osman III and a full translation of the edict described in this paragraph on pp. 73 and 77.

14 In a crucial juridical opinion (fetva), Ebu Suʿud Effendi, a 16th-century Ottoman chief mufti, argued that a Muslim man who dresses like a non-Muslim is in effect divorced from his wife since Muslim women are barred from marrying non-Muslims in Islamic law. Düzdağ, M. Ertuğrul, Şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi Fetvaları, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1983), 118Google Scholar.

15 The patriarch uses the generic term “them” to describe Muslim women in the text. Qaraʿali, Bulus, “Manshur Batryarki Qadim,” al-Majalla al-Surriya 4 (1929): 376–77Google Scholar. I thank the anonymous IJMES reviewer for bringing this source to my attention.

16 Zilfi, Madeline, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Post-Classical Age (1600–1800) (Minneapolis, Minn.: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988), 129–32Google Scholar; idem, Women and Slavery, 70–71; Baer, Marc David, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 67–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ze'evi, Producing Desire, 77–98.

17 Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 43.

18 Quataert, Donald, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Masters, Bruce, “Christians in a Changing World,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839, ed. Faroqhi, Suraiya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 275–77Google Scholar; and Masters, Christian and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 61.

20 Russell, Alexander, The Natural History of Aleppo (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794), 1:380Google Scholar; Halsband, Robert, ed., The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 313–14Google Scholar.

21 Translated by Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 55–58.

22 Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab, Sexuality in Islam, trans. Sheridan, Alan (London: Routledge, 1985), 166Google Scholar.

23 SMH 55:48:162 2 Rajab 1147H/28 November 1734.

24 Cook, Michael, Forbidding Wrong in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, “Public Morality in the 18th Century Ottoman Damascus,” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 55, nos. 55–56 (1990): 180–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Semerdjian, Elyse, “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 94–99Google Scholar.

26 See Ze'evi's discussion of al-Nabulusi in Producing Desire, 112. The remaining references in this paragraph, translated by the author, can be found in al-Nabulusi, Tʿatir al-Anam fi Tʾabir al-Manam (Cairo: Dar Ihyaʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya, 1972), 1:156.

27 Ze'evi, Producing Desire, 112; Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, 167, 172.

28 See el-Rouayheb, Khaled, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 41–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ze'evi, Producing Desire. These works document Islamic discourse on same-sex intimacy within bathhouses. I found no cases of this type registered in Aleppo's shariʿa court registers in the period sampled, though a few cases of men accused of same-sex intercourse appeared in the 18th century, one of which resulted in a conviction in 1735. See Semerdjian, Elyse, “‘Because He Is so Tender and Pretty’: Sexual Deviance and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture 18 (2012): 175–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Walter Andrews weaves together Ottoman literary and legal documents in his discussion of homoeroticism in Ottoman baths, in The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 284–85.

30 Simeon Lehatsi, The Travel Accounts of Simeon of Poland, trans. Bournoutian, George (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda, 2007), 200Google Scholar.

31 The quoted text is in colloquial Syrian Arabic; see Burayk, Tarikh al-Sham, 74. Also mentioned in Grehan, Everyday Life and Consumer Culture, 150.

32 Marcus, Abraham, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 3, 13, 340Google Scholar.

33 For a detailed description of Aleppo's shariʿa courts see Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path,” 63–72.

34 Astrid Meier draws a distinction between Syrian- and Ottoman-style bathhouses, in “Bathing as a Translocal Phenomenon? Bathhouses in the Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire,” in Bathing Culture of Anatolian Civilizations: Architecture, History, and Imagination, ed. Nina Ergin (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 174, 177, 180, 189.

35 See SMH 45:73:177 19 Ramadan, 1130H/15 August 1718. References to bathing times can be found in Surmeyan, Ardavazt, Patmutʾiwn Halepi hayots, 3rd ed. (Aleppo, Syria: Bibliotheque Arménienne de la foundation Calouste Gulbenkian, 2003), 1:192Google Scholar.

36 Faroqhi, Suraiya, “Guildsmen and Handicraft Producers,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839, vol. 3, ed. Faroqhi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 344–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I discuss the policing of moral breaches more generally with a specific discussion of guilds in “Off the Straight Path,” 88–93. See also Wilkins, Charles L., Forging Urban Solidarity: Ottoman Aleppo 1640–1700 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010), 212–21Google Scholar.

37 Ayalon, Yaron, “Ottoman Urban Privacy in Light of Disaster Recovery,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 516–17Google Scholar.

38 See the discussion of a case of illicit sex between a Muslim woman and a Jewish man in 17th-century Istanbul in Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 71; and Baer, Marc David, “Death in the Hippodrome: Sexual Politics and Legal Culture in the Reign of Mehmet IV,” Past and Present 210 (February 2011): 61–91CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

39 Social and legal regulation are the subject of Zilfi, Women and Slavery; and Zarinebaf, Fariba, Crime and Punishment in Istanbul: 1700–1800 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

40 This is true in Ottoman legal discourse, according to Ze'evi, Producing Desire, 60. For legal practice in Ottoman Aleppo and Aintab, see Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path,” 164; and Peirce, Leslie, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003), 90Google Scholar.

41 Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 173–81.

42 Peirce, Morality Tales, 263; Ze'evi, Producing Desire, 65; Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path,” 43–44.

43 See SMH 45:604: 243 10 Rabiʿ al-Awwal 1131 AH/February 1719, discussed in Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path,” 49.

44 Heyd, Uriel, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, ed. Ménage, V.L. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 109–30Google Scholar; and Ze'evi, Producing Desire, 59. On prosecution for mingling of the sexes in private homes, see Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path”; and Lutfi, Huda, “Manners and Customs of Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women: Female Anarchy versus Male Sharʿi Order in Muslim Male Prescriptive Treatises,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Keddie, Nikki R. and Baron, Beth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 104Google Scholar.

45 Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 115–16.

46 Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 43–44.

47 Kütükoğlu, Mübahat S, ed., Osmanlılarda narh müessesesi ve 1640 tarihli narh defteri (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1983), 261Google Scholar; Meier, “Bathing as a Translocal Phenomenon?,” 184; Jean-Claude David and Dominique Hubert, “Le dépérissement du hammam dans la ville: le cas d'Alep,” Le Cahiers de la recherche architecturale 10, no. 11 (April 1982): 70.

48 Russell, Alexander, A Natural History of Aleppo, vol. 1 (London: A. Millar, 1756), 85–86Google Scholar.

49 Heyd, Studies, 231, quoted in Astrid Meier, “Bathing as a Translocal Phenomenon?,” 184; and Cohen, Amnon, Jewish Life under Islam: Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 In this fascinating case discussed by Cohen, peasants and non-Muslims were lumped together in the same category, demonstrating that peasants, understood here to be the lower rungs of the normative Muslim category, could share a social status with non-Muslims. Cohen, Jewish Life under Islam, 138.

51 Marcus, The Middle East, 42.

52 SMH 97:52 28 Jumada II 1175AH/ 24 January 1762.

53 Cohen, Jewish Life under Islam, 73; Meier, “Bathing as a Translocal Phenomenon?,” 185; Lichtenstadter, I., “The Distinctive Dress of Non-Muslims in Islamic Countries,” Historia Judaica 5 (1943): 35–52Google Scholar; Raymond, André, “Les bains publics au Caire à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Annales Islamologiques 8 (1969): 148–50Google Scholar; el Nahal, Galal, The Judicial Administration of Ottoman Egypt in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago and Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1979), 56Google Scholar; Yusuf, Abu, Kitab al-Kharaj (Cairo: al-Matbaʿa al-Salafiyya, 1962), 127–28Google Scholar. Sumptuary codes had grown so lax that a number of firmans were issued in the 18th century to reaffirm the empire's position on clothing for dhimmīs and women. See Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 59–62.

54 Raymond, “Les bains publics,” 148, 150; Meier, “Bathing as a Translocal Phenomenon?,” 185–86.

55 SMH 143:86:291 9 Shawwal 1209/April 1795. This record is also discussed in Knost, “La société dans le fabourg nord d'Alep,” 128, 141.

56 Although Bruce Masters has noted that jurists also imposed segregated bathing for men, I was unable to locate evidence for this in the shariʿa court registers I examined. See Masters, “Bathhouse,” in Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Masters (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 80.

57 SMH 81:29:74 11 Jumada I, 1165H/26 March 1752 and SMH 81:29:75 12 Jumada I, 1165H/17 March 1752. One of these documents, SMH 81:29:74, was discussed and transcribed by Knost, “La société dans le fabourg nord d'Alep,” 129–30, 142.

58 None of the documents found in the archives contained Christian or Jewish bathhouse keepers nor did they include female plaintiffs or bathhouse attendants.

59 The shariʿa courts in Aleppo orthographically distinguished court appearances by non-Muslim males by using the term walad instead of ibn; such distinctions did not exist for female litigants.

60 The records are inconsistent on the separation of Jewish and Christian women. The 1762 bathing schedule does not separate them.

61 Although I located a total of ten documents from 1726 to 1795, this section will focus primarily on cases that contained detailed bathing schedules for each religious denomination. Some of these documents have been discussed in Marcus, Abraham, “Privacy in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo: The Limits of Cultural Ideals,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 18 (1986): 168Google Scholar; David, Jean-Claude, “L'espace des chrétiens à Alep: ségrégation et mixité, strategies communautaires (1750–1950),” Revue du monde musulmans et de la Méditerranée 55–56 (1990): 157CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meier, “Bathing as a Translocal Phenomenon?,” 185; and Knost, “La société dans le fabourg nord d'Alep,” 128–29.

62 al-Asadi, Khayr al-Din, Ahyaʾ Halab wa-Aswaquha (Damascus: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa-l-Irshad al-Qawmi, 1990), 89, 103, 133, 181Google Scholar; and Raymond, Andre, “Groupes sociaux et géographie urbaine à Alep au XVIIIe siècle,” in The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th Century: The Common and the Specific in the Historical Experience, ed. Thomas Phillip (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1992), 152–54Google Scholar.

63 Marcus, The Middle East, 287.

64 Watenpaugh, Heghnar, The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 158Google Scholar; David, Jean-Claude, “La production de l'espace dans la ville ottomane. Des waqfs musulmans dans des quartiers chrétiens à Alep au XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” in Les relations entre musulmans et chrétiens dans le Bilad al-Cham à l’époque ottomane aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, ed. Boisset, L., Sanagustin, F., and Slim, S. (Beirut: Université de Balamand, IFPO, USJ, 2005), 274Google Scholar.

65 While Jews in Bahsita, al-Bandara, and Masabin were situated within a majority population of Muslims, the northern districts of Aleppo were overwhelmingly Christian. See Marcus, Middle East, 317–18; and Raymond, “Groupes sociaux,” 153–55.

66 Halakhic law required women perform a miqvah in running, rather than standing, water to cleanse menstrual impurity (niddah). Lacking running water in homes, women were instructed to bathe in streams, often in public or in cold weather, making it difficult to follow the requirements. Studies show that Jewish women living in Muslim societies preferred to attend the public bath. Cicurel, Inbal E., “The Rabbinate Versus Israeli (Jewish) Women: The Mikvah as a Contested Domain,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues 3 (2000): 181Google Scholar; Meier, “Bathing as a Translocal Phenomenon?,” 186.

67 The exception is Hammam al-Tal, where Jews and Muslims were allowed two consecutive days of bathing.

68 This was a period of intensified regulation of non-Muslim comportment under the reigns of Osman II (1754–57) and Mustafa III (1757–74). Non-Muslims were targeted in a series of edicts, and were sometimes even killed for violating the guidelines of proper dress. For more on the “clothing wars,” see Zilfi, “Goods in the Mahalle,” esp. 297–300.

69 Masters, Christians and Jews, 53–60.

70 Marcus, Middle East, 316–18; Nour, Antoine Abdel, Introduction à l'histoire urbain de la Syrie Ottomane (xvie-xviiie siècle) (Beirut: Librarie Orientale, 1982), 174–77Google Scholar. Bruce Masters has called this choice of religious minorities to live apart “psychological distancing.” Christians and Jews, 33.

71 Ze'evi, Producing Desire, 70. This re-periodization of modernization in the Ottoman Empire reflects a recent trend among 18th-century Ottomanists. Virginia Aksan has shown how 19th-century military reforms dovetailed with those of the 18th century, in “Military Reform and Its Limits in a Shrinking Ottoman World, 1800–1840,” in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 117–33.

72 SMH 143:86:291 9 Shawwal 1209 AH/April 1795.

73 The schedule offers two bathing days a week, Saturdays and Tuesdays, for Christian and Jewish women. Quotations are translated by this author from SMH 97:52 28 Jumayda, 1175AH/January 1762.

74 The text is referred to as al-Mujtaba, which may be a reference to the work of Ahmad ibn Shuʿaib al-Nasaʾi (830–915). Although the translation and interpretation in this section is my own, Abraham Marcus makes a brief reference to this important case in “Privacy,” 168.

75 For example, “The Chapter on Clothing,” in al-Marghinani, al-Hadaya: Sharh Bidayat al-Mubtadi (Beirut: Dar al-Arqam, n.d.), 4:363–65.

76 Fadwa El Guindi translates ʿawra as “blemish.” Hans Wehr defines it as “defectiveness,” “imperfection,” and “flaw.” However, ʿawra also connotes “pudenda” or “genitals” and extrapolating from that definition I have opted to translate the term as “nakedness.” See Guindi, El, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (New York: Berg Publishers, 1999), 140–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 As do the Qurʾanic verses on modesty, al-Marginani offers parity between men and women when he cites Abu Hanifa's ruling that “a [Muslim] woman may see of another [Muslim] woman what a [Muslim] man may see of a [Muslim] man.” Al-Marginani, al-Hadaya, 4:368.

78 al-Alusi, Shihab al-Din al-Sayyid Mahmud, Ruh al-Maʿani fi Tafsir al-Qurʾan al-ʿAzim wa-l-Sabʿa al-Mathani (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1971), 9:336Google Scholar; al-Razi, Tafsir al-Kabir, 23, 201–204; and Ibn al-Jawzi, Ahkam al-Nisaʾ (Cairo: Dar al-Manar, n.d.), 31. This is by no means an exhaustive survey of juridical positions on the subject of ʿawra, a subject worth further study. The Aleppo registers gloss the non-maḥram category as ajānib or “strangers,” meaning persons that fall outside the close-kinship boundaries that render an individual of the opposite sex unmarriageable. Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path,” 96–97.

79 ʿAbidin, Ibn, Radd al-Muhtar ʿala al-Durr al-Mukhtar, vols. 1–7 (Quetta, Pakistan: Maktaba Majidiyya, 1404H/1983–84), 1:297–298, 5:258Google Scholar. Al-Razi is in agreement with this argument in Tafsir al-Kabir, 23:204.

80 Ibn ʿAbidin, Radd al-Muhtar, 1:301. Mysteriously, Ibn ʿAbidin doubled the count on some areas of the male body (thighs) and not others (testicles).

81 There is a distinction made in the record between a towel worn apron style around the waist (fūṭa) and those used for drying or covering other parts of the body (manāshif). They were distinguished by color; the fūṭa was blue and manāshif were white. SMH 101:265: 679 4 Jumada I, 1182AH/September 1768. Also in Marcus “Privacy,” 168.

82 The Qurʾan uses the term araba for “desire”; jurists sometimes use the term shahwa, meaning “passion.”

83 These positions are summarized in Kathir, Ibn, Tafsir al-Qurʾan al-ʿAzim (Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, 2009), 2:1329Google Scholar. Exceptions to women seeing other women's ʿawra have to be made for midwives in court practice. See SMH 4:144:717 28 Rabiʿ al-Thani 1052AH/July 1642, discussed in Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path,” 88–89; and Shaham, Ron, “Women as Expert Witnesses in Pre-Modern Islamic Courts,” in Law, Custom, and Statute in the Muslim World: Studies in Honor of Aharon Layish, ed. Shaham, Ron (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 41–65Google Scholar. Al-Alusi's diverging interpretation on non-Muslim women can be found in Ruh al-Maʿani, 9:338.

84 Kathryn Babayan offers a unique examination of homoerotic desire between women in 17th-century Iran; see “‘In Spirit We Ate Each Other's Sorrow’: Female Companionship in Seventeenth-Century Safavi Iran,” in Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 239–74.

85 Ibn ʿAbidin, Radd al-Muhtar, 5:263.

86 Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path,” 94–99, 127; a variation of this term is used to describe illicit sex in Rafeq, “Public Morality,” 183.

87 Alim Muhammed ibn Hamza (Haci Emirzade), Risala fi Bayan Nazar al-Dhimmiyya li-l-Muslima, 393/5 Suleymaniye Library, 12. I would like to thank Nir Shafir for sharing this manuscript with me.

88 For a decree from 16th-century Istanbul describing non-Muslims as inappropriately lingering in shops in order to associate with men, see Andrews, The Age of Beloveds, 277.

89 Kathir, Ibn, Tafsir al-Qurʾan al-ʿAzim (Beirut: Dar ibn Hazim, 2009), 2:1329Google Scholar; and al-Alusi, Ruh al-Maʿani, 9:338.

90 SMH 97:52 28 Jumada II 1175AH/January 1762.

91 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Douglas argues that pollution threatened communal boundaries, demanding that adherents purify the physical body; contact with persons outside the sacred community can have the same polluting effect. For discussions of Douglas and Islam, see Marcus, Julie, “Islam, Women, and Pollution in Turkey,” Journal of the Anthropological Association 15 (1984): 204–18Google Scholar; Reinhardt, Kevin, “Impurity/No Danger,” History of Religions 30 (1990): 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katz, Marion, Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2002), 18–24Google Scholar; Safran, Janina M., “Rules of Purity and Confessional Boundaries: Maliki Debates about the Pollution of the Christian,” History of Religions 42 (2003): 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Qurʾan 9:28.

93 Ismaʾil ibn ʿAmr ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Qurʾan, 2:1329 and Ibn al-Jawzi's account of the same tradition, in Ahkam al-Nisaʾ (Cairo: Dar al-Manar, n.d.), 32, designate Jewish and Christian women (nisāʾ al-yahūd wa-l-naṣārā), rather than polytheists, as the target of ʿUmar's ban.

94 Safran, “Rules of Purity,” 198–99, 205, 210.

95 Armanios, Febe, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 SMH 113:233:574 17 Rajab 1190AH/September 1776.

97 Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

98 Sociologist Elif Ekin Aksit, in her study of women's contemporary bathing practices in Turkey, argues that this act of reclaiming is in itself transgressive in neighborhoods where women contest discourses about danger in urban space. “The Women's Quarters in the Historical hammam,” Gender, Place and Culture 18 (2011): 279.

99 Marcus, “Privacy,” 175–77.

100 SMH 143:86:291 9 Shawwal 1209 AH/April 1795.

101 This concern is expressed by 14th-century Maliki scholar Ibn al-Hajj in Lutfi, “Manners,” 101, 105, 109. On the danger of nonconforming non-Muslims and women as expressed by religious puritans in the 18th century, see Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 44.

102 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 35.