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“Nudity and the Dhimmi Woman: Regulating Co-Confessional Bathing in Eighteenth Century Aleppo”
Abstract
While many scholars have analyzed gender and non-Muslim status as discreet social categories, this study explores the intersecting axes of gender-class-religion within a series of nine eighteenth century bathhouse orders registered in Aleppo’s shari‘a courts. The eighteenth century witnessed the revival of waning sartorial codes as the Ottoman Empire sought to preserve social privileges under threat by non-Muslims and women who flouted imperial prescriptions. Ancient sumptuary laws were revived at a time when the empire was faced with political crises, religious revivalism, and showing signs of early experimentation with modernization. Aleppo’s shari‘a courts and the city’s bathhouse keeper’s guild were tasked with monitoring transgressions within the city’s bathhouses. The empire would later disband the sumptuary laws altogether soon after this brief experiment. Increased regulation of women and non-Muslim minorities can be found in bathing regulations that mandated separate bath sundries for Muslims and non-Muslims and, more severely, strict prohibitions on co-confessional bathing for women. Aleppo’s bathhouse regulations are placed within the wider context of Islamic and Ottoman discourses on nudity (‘awra) and co-confessional bathing. Several jurists declared that non-Muslim (dhimmi) women were to be treated as unrelated men and, therefore, forbidden to gaze upon a naked Muslim woman. These debates are included in order to further expose the legal scaffolding upon which the Ottoman rulings were constructed.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Syria
Sub Area
13th-18th Centuries