Women's History and Ottoman Sharia Court Records: Shifting Perspectives in Social History

Hawwa ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris Agmon
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
North American ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Middle Eastern Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Turn ◽  
Women’S History

AbstractThis paper revisits some methodological and conceptual aspects of scholarly works on the social history of Middle Eastern women based on Ottoman court records that were published in the last three decades. It discusses the main approaches employed by historians in the field for analyzing court records, and the circumstances that shaped these patterns. It shows that, during the 1970s and 1980s, this body of scholarly works on women's history, as part of Middle Eastern social history, adhered to historiographical approaches that did not follow the "cultural turn" characterizing West European and North American historiography. This situation, however, has recently changed.

The Use of Ottoman Sharīʿa Court Records As a Source for Middle Eastern Social History: A Reappraisal

1998 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dror Ze'Evi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Large Geographical Area ◽  
History Of

AbstractSharīʿa court records are among the most important sources available for the social, economic and cultural history of the Ottoman empire and its provinces, especially from the sixteenth century onwards. These records contain invaluable material on diverse subjects such as economic consumption, agrarian relations, personal status, social stratification, crime and local politics. While covering a large geographical area and spanning several centuries, these records are often regarded by researchers as a single, homogeneous source and treated as a simple account of facts.In this essay, I argue that Sharīʿa court records are a complex source and that researchers should be cautious about accepting the information they contain at face-value. From their questionable statistical representation of society to their biased representation of Islamic law and order, these records defy categorization as simple reflections of reality. Comparisons between different geographical areas and time periods — and to fieldwork carried out in contemporary Sharīʿa courts, demonstrate the potential distance between the records and the reality they purportedly convey.

Problems in the Study of Middle Eastern Women

1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikki R. Keddie
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Third World ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Middle Eastern Women ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Women’S History

The study of Middle Eastern women, past and present, poses a number of methodological problems, some common to Third World studies and others peculiar to the Middle East. Recent research and editorial experience lead me to some conclusions regarding research on Middle Eastern women, both historical and contemporary. The most obvious problem is that, as compared either with many other areas of Middle Eastern history or with numerous geographical areas of women's history, almost no serious scholarly historical work has been done.

Gender and Ottoman Social History

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Başak Tuğ
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Past Experiences

Starting with Said's critique of Orientalism but going well beyond it, poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of modernity have challenged not only one-dimensional visions of Western modernity—by “multiplying” or “alternating” it with different modernities—but also the binaries between the modern and the traditional/premodern/early modern, thus resulting in novel, more inclusive ways of thinking about past experiences. Yet, while scholars working on the Middle East have successfully struggled against the Orientalist perception of the Middle East asthetradition constructed in opposition to the Western modern, they often have difficulties in deconstructing the traditionwithin, that is, the premodern past. They have traced the alternative and multiple forms of modernities in Middle Eastern geography within the temporal borders of “modernity.” However, going beyond this temporality and constructing new concepts—beyond the notion of tradition—to understand the specificities of past experiences (which are still in relationship with the present) remains underdeveloped in the social history of the Middle East.

Not Dusk, but Dawn: The Cultural Turn and German Social History After 1990

2008 ◽  
Vol 34-35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 37-62
Author(s):  
Arnd Bauerkämper
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
West Germany ◽  
East European ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Eastern And Western Europe ◽  
Cultural Turn

This article focuses on the evolution of social history in pre- 1989 West Germany and the GDR and, on the basis of this overview, identifies new, innovative historiographical trends on (re-)writing social history in unified Germany. It is argued that, for many decades, West German historiography had been characterized by sharp debates between the more established advocates of investigations into social structures and processes, on the one hand, and the grass-roots historians of everyday life, on the other. Since the early 1990s, however, this antagonism has considerably receded in favour of synthetic perspectives. At the same time, interest in the history of East European states and regions has considerably increased. This article highlights these new analytical trends in recent German historiography by taking as example studies of the social history of the GDR. In the unified Germany, the history of the GDR has received particular attention. Access to new sources has also enabled historians to link the histories of Eastern and Western Europe, either by employing comparative perspectives or investigating cross-border entanglements.

scholarly journals Long March of women: Labour movement and its impact on the intellectual and social history of conflicts

2021 ◽  
pp. 169-182
Author(s):  
Jelena Lalatović
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Gender History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Second World ◽  
Women’S History

This paper analyzes basic theoretical notions of the oppression of women, class inequality, women's history, and gender history discussed in the study named Dugi ženski marš. Položaj radnica i ženski aktivizam u Hrvatskoj između dvaju svjetskih ratova authored by a croatian historian Ana Rajković (2021). What is more, the paper examines the role of these assessments in creating the historiographical narrative as a whole. The study by Ana Rajković is an innovative synthesis of various insights about women's history in both the labour and feminist movement in Yugoslavia in the interwar period. Furthermore, the study provides possibilities for (re)interpretation of these insights in the context of women's contemporary social and intellectual history. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to re-examine the theoretical and methodological differences between contemporary historiography, of which Ana Rajković is a representative, and seminal historical syntheses in Yugoslavia after the Second World War, whose main focus was also on female members of the communist movement and their activity in the interwar period.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-554
Author(s):  
Beth Baron
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Gender History ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Cultural Turn ◽  
Women’S History

Women's history emerged as a branch of social history in the 1970s, parallel to the feminist movement. Scholars of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey began producing studies in numbers in the 1980s. The trickle of scholarship became a stream in the 1990s, developing greater theoretical complexity with the incorporation of gender as a category of analysis. The taking up of gender coincided with the cultural turn in historical studies, and gender history built on, or encompassed, women's history, as questions about whether “women” was a category at all were raised. The interest in gender was quickly followed by attention to sexuality, masculinity, and related topics.

MARGARET L. MERIWETHER, The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). Pp. 286. $45 cloth, $22 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-627
Author(s):  
Ellen L. Fleischmann
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Court Records ◽  
University Of Texas ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

As Margaret Meriwether notes in her Introduction to this well-crafted study, until recently there has been little history of the Middle Eastern family. There were “histories of families,” which is not the same as a solidly researched sub-discipline within the broader field of Middle Eastern history, because these “did not deal with the family as an institution, its evolution over time, nor the relationship between family and society” (p. 2). The difficulty derives in part (as it does for other sub-fields of Middle Eastern history, particularly social history) from problems of sources that are partial, limited, or sometimes non-existent, and often where they do exist are unavailable. There are few written records on certain subjects, particularly private lives. Scholars of social history and anthropology have relied increasingly on the use of Islamic court records as sources for social history. The growing body of works produced from this scholarship has been highly sophisticated, nuanced, and exciting, opening windows into the history of private life in the Middle East. This book is a welcome contribution to this growing field of scholarship.

Comment on Tilly: Women’s History, Social History, and Deconstruction

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gay L. Gullickson
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Family Roles ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
The Social ◽  
Methodological Tool ◽  
Economic Constraints ◽  
Women’S History

Louise Tilly’s thoughtful and provocative essay “Gender, Women’s History, and Social History” makes a genuine contribution to our thinking about the research that has been done in women’s history by proposing new categories for analysis and by addressing the current debate over the usefulness of deconstruction as a methodological tool for historians. She demonstrates that we have been engaged in “the study of women in time,” with some success. We have studied women’s occupations, sexuality, personal relationships, marriage choices, family roles, and education. We have examined changes in women’s legal and political rights, their engagement in social and political causes, their successes and failures in the political arena. We have analyzed the ways in which states have tried to regulate women’s behavior, the social and economic constraints under which women have functioned, and the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. And we know infinitely more than we did two decades ago about these subjects.

Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Vickery
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Public Power ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The Social ◽  
Open Debate ◽  
Changing Roles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women’S History

ABSTRACTTwo very powerful stories structure the history of the changing roles of English women. The tale of the nineteenth-century separation of the spheres of public power and private domesticity relates principally to the experience of middle-class women. The other story, emerging from early modern scholarship, recounts the social and economic marginalization of propertied women and the degradation of working women as a consequence of capitalism. Both narratives echo each other in important ways, although strangely the capacity of women's history to repeat itself is rarely openly discussed. This paper critically reviews the two historiographies in order to open debate on the basic categories and chronologies we employ in discussing the experience, power and identity of women in past time.

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