This paper explores medieval Islamic literature produced by jurists in which male authors reflect upon women as people with intellectual, spiritual, and social requirements. In these texts, men discuss the religious fulfillment Muslim women ought to be able to achieve under ideal circumstances, and they imagine what Muslim women must find frustrating about the limitations placed upon them by religious strictures, by nature itself, and by the men in their lives. Interestingly, the frustrations most commonly mentioned are not the ones which are at the forefront of modern debates within in the Islamic world – such as divorce law, female prayer-leadership, modest attire for women, and space for non-sexual relationships between members of the opposite sex. Rather, the frustrations mentioned are largely concerned with the perceived lack of sanctified communal occasions for women to interact with each other. The activities which these jurists believe women covet are characterized by their sociability and piety – pilgrimage, communal prayer, visits to the sick, participation in funeral processions, and military participation. With the exception of involvement in warfare, these are the kinds of activities which seem to occupy a certain grey area in the legal religious landscape. Based on what jurists themselves describe, it is clear that women participate in such events and that such participation is perceived as being socially acceptable and even pious by some women and their male family members, while at the same time certain authorities (often the authors themselves) view these activities as syncretistic or impious. The opposition to such behavior does not seem to stem from concerns about sexual impropriety so much as concerns about the religious culture fostered when women meet together in settings that are fraught with spiritual significance. Some authors, such as Ibn al-Hajj al-Abdari (d.1336, in Egypt) go so far as to say that through these activities Muslim women have developed their own system of religion, with its own rituals and authorities, which parallels the male-dominated shariah system. In his Madkhal, Ibn al-Hajj argues that the best way to mend the rift between male and female Islamic culture is for Muslims jurists to spend more time and energy cultivating intellectual relationships with their wives and involving themselves in women’s spheres of activity. Other medieval jurists did not argue for a specific solution, but nonetheless thought it important to articulate and explore the contrast between how men and women experienced the communal aspects of Islamic life.

The history of the family in the Middle East and North Africa is currently going through a state of revival. Since the publication of Duben & Behar’s Istanbul Households (1991) and Meriwether’s The Kin Who Count (1999), among other pioneering case studies, historians and other social scientists have been discovering new archival sources and raising new questions that challenge many prevailing assumptions about the “typical” Muslim or Middle-Eastern family and its transformation from past to present times. Most research has focused on urban contexts within the Ottoman Empire for which data is more available. As a consequence, rural, peripheral societies have been left largely understudied. In this paper, I will examine the case of the Ammeln, a group of Berber-speaking peasants from the Anti-Atlas Mountains of Southern Morocco, where I carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork from 2004 to 2006. I intend to present the distinctive features of their living arrangements by considering a set of family deeds, wills and other legal documents dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries that belonged to a local agnatic group. As these sources show, when local households developed and reached their highest level of complexity, they tended to comprise only a senior couple and no more than one junior couple, who was expected to provide care for the elders and, in exchange, to inherit the house and a greater share of the family estate. As I will argue, the Ammeln adopted this particular level of residential growth, not because they were confronted with demographic constrains and other external barriers preventing them from realizing their “ideal” for larger and more complex households, but because they were attempting, in a strategic and intentional way, to limit the number of couples or family units living together under the same roof, which in turn helped to reduce internal tension and conflict. In the end, the case of the Ammeln sheds light on the problematic nature of intergenerational cohabitation and compels us to reframe key questions to ask when we account for the conditions under which some individuals, in specific places and in specific points in time, choose certain forms of living arrangements rather than others.

This paper questions the claims that the Qur’ān prohibits the marriage between Muslim women and men from the People of the Book (Ahl al-Kitāb). It argues that the assumed prohibition is a result of patriarchal readings of the Qur’ān by male Muslim exegetes. It also suggests that perpetuation of these unequal rulings between men and women comes from the works of tafsīr and fiqh, and not from the Qur’ān itself, or even the Sunnah. The paper begins by reassessing classical and contemporary authoritative Sunni tafsīrs by focusing on Qur’ān 2:221 and 5:5 that are used as the basis for the rulings of marriage between Muslims and non-Muslims—i.e., the exegetes’ understandings of key Qur’ānic terminology in these two verses. These terms are al-mushrikīn (literally those who attribute peers to God), yu’minū (to believe), Ahl al-Kitāb, and al-kuffār (the unbelievers). The paper then shows how the Qur’ānic text could offer a different understanding if the exegete’s perspective were to change. The paper concludes that the absence of female voice in the process of interpreting the Qur’ān has had a great influence on the rulings related to women. The commentaries on the two verses discussed in the paper show that the male exegetes, who entirely monopolized the process of scriptural interpretation, did not treat men and women’s issues equally. While they attempted to discuss the different possibilities of interpreting a word or part of a verse that could open the door for more male freedom, no such attempt is made when discussing women’s issues. Unfortunately, this unequal treatment of the Qur’anic texts has resulted in a unique consensus on legal rulings pertaining to women. The paper demonstrates that the consensus formed is based on interpretations colored by the patriarchal, misogynistic and imperial impulses of the exegetes. Ever since the recognition of ijmā‘ as a source of legislation, these rulings have been accepted as normative until the present day. Additionally, the paper highlights the possibilities that one could, while relying on the same materials used by earlier exegetes, even using the same methodology, reach conclusions very different from the accepted ijmā‘. This could be possible even without resorting to twentieth-century approaches of interpretation if only we begin to treat men and women’s issues equally. The paper therefore questions the validity of precedents set by ijmā‘ and makes a case for reevaluation of this critical issue.

In 1991, at the onset of a ferocious armed struggle in Algeria between rebel Islamist groups and the state commonly known as the “dark decade,” local caricaturist Dilem invented an Algerian everywoman he then placed in a number of contexts over the years. “Madame Algeria,” as he coined her, became a staple of his cartoons, bearing witness to the conflict’s worst tragedies and excoriating the political actors whom many Algerians blamed for the country’s turmoil. Yet, while this character supposedly stood in for the nation’s frustrated civilian majority, she fed into sexist tropes of older women as shrewish. “Madame Algeria” was one of many representations of Algerian women that predominately male journalists created to try to show that all women in the country actively resisted political Islamism. Ironically, by crafting these images, writers and artists actually marginalized female voices and distorted women’s role in the conflict. Indeed, national and international media outlets at the time described Algerian women as the ultimate opponents and victims of Islamic “fundamentalism.” Their interpretation of events was not entirely false; Algerian women on the whole suffered more from the war’s gendered violence than their male counterparts and many women protested against political Islamism and terrorism. However, these depictions constructed a dangerous binary whereby women were perennial victims of and activist against Islamism and terrorism, an interpretation of the conflict that clashed with its complex realities. Some women supported Islamist movements and engaged in terrorist activities while men also participated in anti-fundamentalist protests and were targeted for sexual violence. What were the stakes in portraying war-torn Algeria as a woman when gender roles in the conflict were not as clearly defined as writers and artists like Dilem would have observers believe? Drawing from contemporary media coverage of the war, this paper contends that such constructions were part of a larger trend of journalists both in the country and abroad portraying political Islam as inherently anti-women while positing secular opponents as intrinsically feminist. In doing so, it expands upon work, most notably by Monica Marks and Lila Abu-Lughod, concerning women’s roles in Islamist and terrorist movements as well as media treatment of Muslim women. Scholarship on Algeria’s “dark decade” has generally overlooked women’s engagement in the Islamist movement or armed groups. My presentation fills this gap in the historiography by providing a more nuanced analysis of gender roles and media biases during the conflict.