Wives and work : Islamic law and ethics before modernity /

Wives and Work begins with a seemingly straightforward question: how did pre-modern Sunni jurists and philosophers negotiate the apparent disjuncture between a legal doctrine absolving wives of the duty to do housework and a religious, social, and ethical discourse in which housework, to many, defined what a "wife" was? From there, the study unfolds into essentially two overlapping books. The first is a meticulous study of how legal interpretations of marital relations and gendered labor shifted between the 9th and the 14th centuries. The analysis is especially diligent when reading these interpretations within their dynamic religious, social, and ethical contexts. Here, Katz (New York Univ.) goes into detail about, for example, how commentators understood problems such as financial compensation for housework or the moral function of the marriage contract. Superimposed on this close textual study is a more universal project: a sustained interrogation of Western scholarship on Islamic law and ethics, ranging from gender studies to political theory, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and beyond. The result is a valuable, frequently surprising book that will attract scholars of law and ethics broadly defined as much as specialists in premodern Islamic legal history and philosophy. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. --Ruth Austin Miller, emerita, University of Massachusetts, Boston