Modernizing Marriage examines nineteenth-century socioeconomic, political, and ideological changes that set the stage for codification of Egyptian family law. A wealth of sources, including journals, census records, and juridical texts, allow comparison between ideological constructions of social norms about marriage and actual behaviors. Significantly, Kenneth Cuno delineates the ways in which evolving ideology about family and marriage practices melded precolonial Muslim thought with evolving nineteenth-century European ideals to create something uniquely modern and Egyptian.
When the Ottoman Khedive Tewfiq committed to monogamous marriage, he was responding to both structural and ideological changes in the region. These included obsolescence of the old harem structure and the equation of monogamy with modernity and enlightenment. The move away from polygyny was significant enough that when Tewfiq's successor, Abbas II, decided to marry a second wife, he did so surreptitiously, not with the pomp and circumstance of generations past. Monogamous marriage in the ruling family both modeled and responded to a broader shift in marriage patterns in Egypt (43).
Such shifts correlated with Egyptian elites’ debates on issues such as polygyny, the minimum marriage age, and women's concealment before marriage. Late nineteenth-century census figures and court registers document decreasing polygyny rates, increasing marriage age for men and women, and a decrease in joint households (62–66, 71). These statistics, together with elites’ writings, suggest that similar trends cut across class, rural, and urban divides, albeit at different rates. At the same time, a new family ideology celebrated the conjugal family as the foundation of modern society. Intellectuals argued that a stable family was a primary site for educated mothers to raise patriotic subjects.
Though many historians have examined debates about the conjugal family, Cuno intervenes by arguing that modernist intellectuals were not merely responding to colonial and missionary critiques of Muslim family life (89). Family relations in the precolonial period depended on a “maintenance–obedience” relationship between couples that required men to provide financial support and women, in return, to offer obedience. Women were to remain at home but, notably, were under no obligation to do housework or care for children (80). This differed from French domestic ideology, which promoted women's control over childcare and housework and considered women's visibility in public space as emblematic of civilization (95). Ignoring the French concern with visibility, and eliding Egyptian women's previous exemption from household duties, Egyptian intellectuals indigenized the European ideal by blending its esteem for active motherhood with the responsibilities of the older maintenance-obedience model.
Modernizing Marriage's second half shifts to the development of personal status law. These chapters are full of rich archival stories and surprising insights about the origins and migration of legal concepts later thought to be purely “Islamic.” After a careful look at the reorganization of Shariʿah courts and the consequences of the Hanafization of law, particularly for women, Cuno follows the development of Qadri's Code in 1875. This unofficial code of Muslim family law borrowed from French Algerian civil law, derived, in turn, from French law. Qadri's Code was used in law schools and courts both within and outside of Egypt. Its format differed from older juridical texts that painstakingly recorded debates and opinions of jurists who struggled to come to consensus over legal interpretations. Consequently, readers who used older sources could follow the constructed and contingent nature of legal interpretation (179). In contrast, Qadri's text only recorded preferred legal opinion, eliminating any record of its historical development. This gave Qadri's Code a semblance of “sacred authority” (180).
The specific case of the “house of obedience,” a legal concept stating women were obliged to obey and reside with their husbands, is the focus of the book's final chapter, highlighting a specific consequence of the increasing rigidity and, ultimately, codification of family law. The concept of house of obedience developed first in early-modern France, but police enforcement of the law ceased by the end of the nineteenth century. In North Africa, however, where the law had been transplanted, it persisted. By 1897, police were authorized to enforce orders of obedience in Egypt as well (198). Ironically, by the twentieth century an historical amnesia allowed Western scholars, along with conservative Muslims, to trace the practice expressly to Muslim tradition (185). By looking at shifts and practices that preceded colonialism and codification of law, Modernizing Marriage is a testament to the importance of bridging not just “East–West” divisions but also historiographical boundaries between early-modern and modern histories.
The book is impressive in its scope and attention to multiple historical and interpretative voices. Yet by focusing solely on Islamic personal status law and Islam as the source of authentic cultural tradition, Modernizing Marriage misses an opportunity to address a recurring problem in legal histories of the Middle East. Despite the fact that Egyptian personal status law is a “pluralistic legal regime,” most histories do not treat it as such (Ryan Rowberry and John Khalil, “A Brief History of Coptic Personal Status Law,” Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law 3:80–139, 2010). To offer but one example, in the same time period as Cuno's study, Egypt's Coptic church authorities and a lay Coptic Community Council administered personal status law for their own members, separate from Shariʿah courts, and often in tension with each other. Coptic ideology and marriage practices differed in significant ways from Islamic prescriptions and procedures (the same could be said about Jewish personal status issues), but it is unclear to what extent minorities contributed to evolving family, legal, and gender roles in Egypt. To tell the story of modernizing marriage—or, more broadly, of modernity in Egypt—it seems essential to address groups outside the majority who participated in the process in messy, perhaps contradictory, ways.
Nevertheless, it is clear that this book is an important contribution to histories of the family, Islamic law, and Egyptian society. Anyone interested in these subjects and processes of broad social change would do well to read this book.
