(Eyüp) al-Anßàrì, a Companion of the Prophet who
died in a seventh-century Muslim siege of Byzan-
tine Constantinople.
Women’s involvement with the empire’s justice
system, particularly the Islamic courts, reflects the
relative openness of this mainstay of imperial legit-
imacy. For reasons that have still to be explained,
women’s use of the court system varied from place
to place. For example, seventeenth-century court
cases from the Anatolian towns of Kayseri, Amasya,
Karaman, and Trabzon reveal that women’s par-
ticipation in legal actions ranged from 17 percent
to a surprising 42 percent (Jennings 1975, 59). The
variety of female commercial and financial litiga-
tion further refutes the stereotypes of female pas-
sivity and isolation. On the other hand, most
women who came to the court did so as plaintiffs,
and most plaintiffs were in conflict with husbands
and ex-husbands.
The high incidence of divorce, child custody, sup-
port, and property cases in the court records of the
seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries illuminates
the paradox of family – especially conjugal – insta-
bility in the Ottoman Islamic patriarchal setting.
Recourse to formal adjudication points to women’s
social vulnerability and their difficulty in gaining
entitlements without legal arm-twisting. Women
showed their willingness to pursue claims in a pub-
lic forum, sometimes speaking in their own voices,
at other times through designees. The fact that
there were courts in which they could make their
case was a particular mark of Ottoman rule, which
took care to establish and staff hundreds of courts
throughout its territories.
The natural and man-made disasters afflicting
the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth through the
nineteenth centuries also challenged prescribed
gender roles. The proportion of women who headed
their own households waxed and waned with war-
fare, plague, banditry, and male migration. As in
today’s Middle East, Ottoman men were highly,
though episodically, mobile. Islamic law’s provi-
sions for women to inherit from husbands and
fathers, and to receive compensation from divorc-
ing husbands for mahrbalances and other debts,
lessened women’s economic dependency overall.
Independent means as bargaining leverage was
most evident in the case of mature widows or
divorcees contemplating remarriage. In fact, there
is some evidence that wealthier women sought to
avoid remarriage.
In the eighteenth century, the empire’s military
and economic incapacities and its growing suscep-
tibility to European intervention were manifested
in domestic politics in a heightening of gender ten-202 gender socialization
sions. Sumptuary laws, particularly restrictions on
clothing, were issued with increasing frequency and
severity to force women and other targeted groups
to adhere to the colors, fabrics, and styles that had
traditionally been prescribed for them. The moral-
ist critique of the legislation resembled that of other
Islamic – and non-Islamic – regimes with respect to
the causal link between women’s comportment and
social order. Women’s behavior was often a con-
venient foil for larger state worries. Prior to the
eighteenth century, however, women were usually
singled out in connection with specific historical
occurrences. The barrage of decrees affecting
women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies served similar purposes in Ottoman politics.
Nonetheless, the constant focus on women through
both conservative and reformist sultanates in the
late Ottoman centuries suggests newly enduring
social and political anxieties with which women
were consistently and inextricably linked.Bibliography
R. C. Jennings, Women in early 17th-century Ottoman
judicial records. The sharia court of Anatolian Kayseri,
in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient18 (1975), 53–114.
A. E. Sonbol (ed.), Women, the family, and divorce laws in
Islamic history, Syracuse, N.Y. 1996.
M. C. Zilfi (ed.), Women in the Ottoman Empire. Middle
Eastern women in the early modern era, Leiden 1997.Madeline C. ZilfiSouth AsiaMuslims came to the Indian subcontinent in the
eighth century and established trading relations
between India and Arabia. Nearly a century later
Muslim warriors from across its northern borders,
including Afghans, Persians, and Turks invaded
India and established political hegemony. The
Muslim population in India grew both through
conversion of Hindus to Islam and intermarriage
with local women, as the invading armies did not
bring their wives along with them. The Muslim
population of India is the largest in South Asia.
According to the census of 1941 (the last census
before the 1947 partition into India and Pakistan
and the 1971 division of Bangladesh from Pakis-
tan), Muslims were nearly a quarter of the total
population of India. Post-partition the Muslim
population was larger in India than in Pakistan or
Bangladesh, and it continues to be so.
South Asian Muslims are not a monolithic com-
munity and cannot be represented by a uniform
Islamic image. Muslims in South Asian countries