For those who believe that Muslim harem women were prisoners within an enclosed space in the house deprived of mobility, legal personhood, economic independence, and power, Fay's study of the late Mamluk harem will be eye-opening. For historians of Mamluk-era Egypt, the value of Fay's work lies in her revision of a male-centered scholarly narrative.

Fay begins by explaining Mamluk power as centered around the household, which was both a kinship construct and a residence. Mamluk men perpetuated household power by purchasing, training, and freeing slaves from the Caucasus and Georgia who became their fictive sons and brothers and their real wives and concubines. Fay's extensive research into archived waqf endowment documents demonstrates that Mamluk women were far from chattel slaves. In fact, Mamluk women were central to the consolidation and continuity of powerful Mamluk households. Due to internecine conflict among Mamluk houses, wives lived longer than husbands. Through dower and inheritance, wives accrued vast economic resources, of types and values similar to those owned by prosperous male merchants, and deployed their properties for private and public benefit. An heir who married the widow of his household head would keep that property within the household and ensure his own legitimacy. Fay compares this with the plight of Lady Mary Montagu, an eighteenth-century Englishwoman whose lack of property rights rendered her powerless and who envied the Muslim ladies who owned, sold, and endowed their properties at will.

Fay's strongest chapters are 6 through 10. Chapter 6 traces the social geography of the city as powerful families moved in and out of fashionable quarters. Fay describes Mamluk neighborhoods, public celebrations, and street life that women saw and participated in, allowing the reader to visualize the public spaces women navigated. Chapter 7 analyzes the architecture of Cairo harems, showing that the harem was “not an enclosed space inside a larger male space” mappable via nineteenth-century conceptions of private vs. public space (208). Rather, women penetrated so-called male spaces using balconies and bays with lattice-wood mashrabiyya screens and styles of veiling that allowed women to retain their anonymity in public. Chapter 8 extrapolates from scant extant evidence the social life of a harem lady: visits to bathhouses, to cemeteries, to relatives; reception of guests; management of the household and business investments—a far cry from the sexualized indolence imagined by European travel writers. In chapter 9, Fay brings all the parts of her analysis together to retell the history of the late Mamluk revival with the women as subjects, using the stories of three Mamluk ladies. Fay also points out that the apparent paradox—veiled, secluded, and sexually-subjugated women possessing property, legal personhood, and economic influence—dissolves when one drops the assumption that seclusion meant women were confined to the private sphere (255). The final chapter argues that we derive our image of harem life from the assumption that veiling and seclusion had “fixed and universal meaning that transcend time and space” (259). Fay argues that twentieth-century feminist opponents of the harem and veiling cannot tell us about the pre-modern harem, because the political and economic structures that empowered harem women collapsed in the nineteenth century, when power was “reallocated in a reconfigured public sphere,” leaving women “stranded in a space that became almost purely domestic” (267).

Fay's introductory literature review and summary of Mamluk history make this work accessible to novice graduate and advanced undergraduate students; however, she overreaches some points. She glosses over the racial hierarchy of Islamic slavery and does not question whether a study of white upper-class freed slaves suffices to represent “the harem.” Others, notably Afaf Marsot, have previously shown the economic power of Mamluk women, and it remains unclear whether these women are exceptions or exemplars. Fay also asserts (against Carl Petry) that women “accumulated” property. While her evidence shows women inheriting, selling, and endowing properties, it does not show that women acquired properties intentionally because of their knowledge of the markets; rather, her evidence suggests accumulation through inheritance and dower. There are also signs of careless editing, such as the use of “nationality” for “ethnicity,” repetitive definitions, and transliteration inconsistencies. Despite these flaws, Fay's study remains a fascinating, useful contribution to the history of late Mamluk Egypt.