The book’s setting

Judith E. Tucker’s In the House of the Law examines gender and Islamic law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine. The publisher describes a study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal thinkers and the role of fatwas in understandings of women’s social position. The contents move through marriage, divorce, parenthood, sexuality and reproduction.

That organization connects a history of legal argument with relationships people experienced within households. It also identifies a particular region and period. The scope should remain visible when the book is placed in a bibliography about Islamic law and gender across much wider stretches of time.

An opinion and its audience

A legal opinion can show how a question was formulated and answered. Its preservation in a collection raises further questions about selection, readership and reuse. Those are different from the questions raised by a court record of an individual dispute, even when both concern marriage or divorce.

The difference makes a useful comparative exercise. Choose a specified passage from the book and identify the source genre on which the account relies. Then ask what a different genre could add. A household’s experience cannot simply be read off an opinion, but an opinion’s account of a relationship is itself a subject worth studying.

Edition and argument

The linked publisher page identifies a 2000 paperback edition. Use a catalogue such as WorldCat to distinguish editions before comparing page references with another reader. An author, title and publication year are the beginning of a usable reference, not the whole reference to a passage.

This is an introduction based on the publisher’s description and contents. Its purpose is to place the book in a reading sequence: first locate the historical setting, then identify the legal voices and the evidence, and finally assess the argument in the chapters themselves. That sequence allows a discussion of gender to remain attached to identifiable thinkers and documents.

References

  1. Judith E. Tucker: In the House of the Law

    Publisher's description and contents for Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine. Paperback edition, 2000.

  2. WorldCat

    Locate editions and library holdings. A catalogue record does not guarantee full-text access.

Filed under Women & authority. Sources and corrections.