Intimate partner violence is considered a violation of basic human rights and a risk factor for several health outcomes. While a number of studies investigated the impact of intimate partner violence on both women and infant's health in many countries across the world, very few studies focused on this issue in the Arab region. This study examined the associations between having ever experienced physical intimate partner violence among Egyptian women and reproductive wastage. The analysis was conducted using data from the Egyptian Demographic Health Survey 2005 (EDHS). The survey contained data on all household (HH) members from a multi-stage sample of 21,972 HH with response rate of 98 percent, and 19,474 women of age 15-49 years with a response rate of 99 percent. The violence questions were asked to one eligible woman in a sub-sample of one third of the households selected for anemia testing. The analysis for this study included only ever pregnant married women in that sample (5,161 women). Analysis was conducted using logistic regression. The main outcome variable was whether the women had ever experiencing miscarriage, spontaneous abortion or still birth. Independent variables included: age of respondent, educational level, residence, ever use of intrauterine device (IUD), and consanguinity. Results indicated that after adjusting for these variables, ever experience of physical intimate partner violence was significantly associated with ever experiencing reproductive wastage among ever pregnant married women in Egypt (OR=1.19, C.I.=1.01 , 1.40). This study showed that IPV was significantly associated with reproductive wastage among ever pregnant Egyptian women. IPV remains a public health and human rights concern affecting a considerable number of ever married Egyptian women who have ever experienced such abuse.

Classical Islamic legal doctrine regarding the proper categorization and penalization of sexual violation (rape) was roughly divided into two positions - that which considered rape to be an offense against God alone, and that which considered it to be an offense against both God and the (female) victim. In the former "unitary" approach - exemplified by the anafh school of law - the perpetrator is to be penalized through an application of the corporal punishment for illicit cohabitation (i.e. the oadd zin ). In the latter "composite" approach - exemplified by the M?like school of law - the perpetrator is liable not only to the iadd zine, but must also pay a fine to the victim in the amount of her dower. The question I ask is this: To what extent can we trace these classical positions back to the pre-classical period of Islamic law - that period of the first century and a half or so of Islamn The primary source for legal doctrine and practice in this early phase of Islamic law is the ladpth literature - i.e. the collections of reports that claim to document the words and acts of Muhammad, his companions and the first generations of followers. What can a study of these collections reveal to us about the geographical and/or personal transfer of legal doctrines concerning sexual violation during this early periodl For this study, I will analyze the handful of tadyth reports that directly address sexual violation. Elsewhere, I have analyzed the contents, or muten, of these reports, in order to argue that early Muslim legists possessed a discrete concept of sexual violation, and in order to lay out some basic features of this concept. For this paper, I examine not only the contents, but also the transmission chains (isnsds) of these reports, in order to see if we may reasonably anchor the two basic positions outlined above - that is, the "unitary" one and the "composite" one - in particular jurists and geographical locations. The sources for my study will be aadith collections of the late 2nd/8th - 3rd/9th centuries and biographical works on the dadtth transmitters. Key addth collections for this project are those of Melik b. Anas, `Abd al-Razziq, Ibn Abh Shayba, Bukhert, Tirmidhd, and AbA Dswud. Biographical works upon which I will draw are those of BukhBrD, Abd Ya`lo, Ibn al-Athrr, Dhahabh, and Mizz , among others.

This paper deals with gender and sexuality as intimate aspects of the social transformation associated with the spread of modern industry and in Egypt. The conflict between rising national capitalists and foreign domination during the interwar period spawned the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in al-Mahalla al-Kubra in 1927 as the largest domestically owned textile enterprise in Egypt. This development set in motion unsettling transformations in the town's socio-economic life. Among these were the immigration into the town of thousands of male and female peasants hired to work in the mill, rapid urbanization and population growth, and a host of new social and economic tensions between the urban population and the peasant workers. As a part of a larger project on social transformation into urban industrial life, this paper traces the phenomenal increase of harassment of women, child molestation, prostitution and the public exposure of private homosexual relationships in the town. Encountering public prostitution for the first time in their lives, some newcomers contracted venereal diseases. In workers' slums, up to two dozen adults and children shared tiny rooms. At work, child laborers were at the mercy of their older colleagues and supervisors. These conditions made many of them vulnerable to sexual abuse at work and home. The situation was not much better for female workers. Driven away from their villages and families, many women workers lived in the town or commuted daily in public transportation with strange men. In both cases they faced harassment and the stigma of being "sexually loose". Utilizing archival research and oral history, I argue that the coercive industrial organization and hierarchy in which thousands of men and women both adults and children were concentrated at work and at home under the power of unfamiliar men intensified sexual harassment to a phenomenal level. Rapid urbanization and social transformation stripped away the traditional structures of society and new norms had not yet been reconstructed. The state interfered and selectively criminalized particular sexual practices both among male workers and between workers and women of the town. This exposed private intimacy to public scrutiny and judgment and fed public discourse on morality, public health and the conditions of the working class. The paper draws intensively on a variety of archival sources, including Shari'a, criminal and civil court documents in addition to the 'Abdin Royal Court petition files, the archive of the Corporations Department, memoirs and oral history.

My paper investigates the murder of a twenty-six year old gay man in Istanbul, Turkey, during July 2008. The murder of Ahmet Yildiz received instant international and national media attention (in that order) as "Turkey's first gay honor killing." The suspicion of an honor killing was caused and fueled by two facts: the official complaints Ahmet had filed with the office of the attorney general prior to his murder, which stated he was being threatened by his family, and the fact that his family initially refused to "claim" his body for it to be washed and buried according to Islamic requirements. Through content analysis of news pieces, internet discourse and ethnographic data, I lay out the discourse around Ahmet's murder in mass media and in LGBT circles; and I think through three issues: First, I argue that different queer subcultures produce different politics of visibility, while a simplistic out/closeted binary cannot capture the ways in which desire is organized. Outness however permeates the definition of being political (and vice versa) in the Turkish urban queer context. I use this story to think about the implications of this for who gets to have a political subjectivity and who gets pushed outside the limits of the political. Second, I show how the historical relationships between the institutions of the Nation-State and the Family in Turkey play out in this very incident. I pay special attention to the different ways in which family is discursively, institutionally and legally employed in the examples of the honor killing, the Lambdaistanbul family group's statement, and the international "Ahmet is my family" movement. Third, I think about the category "honor killing," the ways in which is it mobilized by the national and international press, and activist organizations, as well as the political outcomes of its employment.