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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
We are accustomed to thinking about Ottoman reform of the laws governing personal status as a project undertaken under the liberal banner: such reform was progress, an attempt to lift oppression in the interests of justice and the modernization of the society. Insofar as we can speak of a dominant historical narrative in a field that has received very little scholarly attention, it is this image of liberal efforts to alleviate the oppression that women suffered as a result of the strict application of traditional Hanafi law in the Ottoman Empire that shapes our view of the reform project. Most of the established Western scholars of Islamic legal reform have concurred that society awoke to the injustice of this oppression in the course of the nineteenth century and undertook reform as part of an effort to improve the position of women. Responding to the “needs of society”, the reformers undertook to remedy some of the worst abuses. Their task was to introduce legal moralism into a system that had become hopelessly ossified and formalistic, and hence unresponsive to social imperative.
1 See Anderson, Norman, Law Reform in the Muslim World (London: Athlone Press, 1976), p. 39.Google Scholar
2 These views permeate standard writing of legal reform of personal status, including Norman Anderson, op cit., and Islamic Law in the Modern World (New York: New York University Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Coulson, Noel J., Conflicts and Tensions in Islamic Jurisprudence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)Google Scholar; and Schacht, Joseph, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).Google Scholar
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6 Anderson, Norman, Law Reform in the Muslim World (London: Athlone Press, 1976), p. 39.Google Scholar
7 Smart, Carol, Law, Crime, and Sexuality (London: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 187-92.Google Scholar
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12 al-Ramli, Khayr al-Din ibn Ahmad, Kitab al-fatawa al-kubra li-naf al-birriya (Cairo Bulaq: n.p., 1273 H./1856-57 A.D.), vol. 1, p. 67.Google Scholar
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14 For discussion of the legal system in the Arab land of Syria and Palestine, see Tucker, Judith E., In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 1.Google Scholar
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16 Al-'Imadi, as edited by ‘Abidin, Ibn, al-’al-durriya, Uqud (Cairo Bulaq: n.p., 1300 H./1882-83 A.D.), vol. 1, p. 30.Google Scholar
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20 Tucker, Judith E., In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 1.Google Scholar