In Minor Marriage in Early Islamic Law, Carolyn Baugh offers an in-depth exploration of 8th-13th century legal sources on the marriageability of prepubescents, focusing on such issues as maintenance, sexual readiness, consent, and a father’s right to compel. Modern efforts to resist establishment of a minimum marriage age in countries such as Saudi Arabia rest on claims of early juristic consensus that fathers may compel their prepubescent daughters to marry. This work investigates such claims by highlighting the extremely nuanced discussions and debates recorded in early legal texts. From the works of famed early luminaries to the “consensus writers” of later centuries, each chapter brings new insights into a complex and enduring debate.

A remarkable research accomplishment. Ali leads us through three strands of early Islamic jurisprudence with careful attention to the nuances and details of the arguments.

This study examines the most beloved and controversial of Mohammed's wives as a rich symbol for medieval and modern Islamic society. It explores the debates surrounding A'isha's depiction in historical literature, describing how she has been praised and condemned by generations of Muslim writers.

A longitudinal history of Islamic child custody law, challenging Euro-American exceptionalism to reveal developments that considered the best interests of the child.

High rates of divorce, often taken to be a modern and western phenomenon, were also typical of medieval Islamic societies. By pitting these high rates of divorce against the Islamic ideal of marriage,Yossef Rapoport radically challenges usual assumptions about the legal inferiority of Muslim women and their economic dependence on men. He argues that marriages in late medieval Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem had little in common with the patriarchal models advocated by jurists and moralists. The transmission of dowries, women's access to waged labour, and the strict separation of property between spouses made divorce easy and normative, initiated by wives as often as by their husbands. This carefully researched work of social history is interwoven with intimate accounts of individual medieval lives, making for a truly compelling read. It will be of interest to scholars of all disciplines concerned with the history of women and gender in Islam.

It is widely held today that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do housework. Wives’ purported exemption from domestic labor became a talking point among Muslims responding to Orientalist stereotypes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” by the late nineteenth century, and it has been a prominent motif in writings by Muslim feminists in the United States since the 1980s. In Wives and Work, Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives’ domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics. She reconstructs a complex discussion among Sunni legal scholars of the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE and examines its wide-ranging implications. As early as the ninth century, the prevalent doctrine that wives had no legal duty to do housework stood in conflict with what most scholars understood to be morally and religiously right. Scholars’ efforts to resolve this tension ranged widely, from drawing a clear distinction between legal claims and ethical ideals to seeking a synthesis of the two. Katz positions legal discussion within a larger landscape of Islamic normative discourse, emphasizing how legal models diverge from, but can sometimes be informed by, philosophical ethics. Through the lens of wives’ domestic labor, this book sheds new light on notions of family, labor, and gendered personhood as well as the interplay between legal and ethical doctrines in Islamic thought.

This book is the first ethnographic study of Muslim minorities' practice of Islamic law in contemporary China.