Most knowledge production on Islam, gender and modernity in the Middle East has routinely operated with and contributed to notions of family and Islamic law. Islamist, Orientalist and nationalist narratives have assumed a monolithic, extended and patrilocal Arab/Muslim family and an authentic and authoritarian sharia in their reconstructions of the region's past until their modernisation. This book fills an important gap in the literature on the social history of family by historicising how people organised family in the Middle East from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
The key argument in the book is that property devolution as a social, pious and legal act has both reproduced and transformed family as a concept and practice in the Eastern Mediterranean region under Ottoman rule. To reach this conclusion, Beshara Doumani has examined thousands of local court records and related archival material to compare how family was envisioned in two major provincial towns, Nablus and Tripoli, in the period 1660–1860. The overwhelming majority of the propertied individuals in both towns devolved their property before they died, when the strict rules of Islamic inheritance would come into effect. They did so by endowing nearly all of their revenue-producing properties as family waqfs (pious endowments) with clear instructions to designate who counted as rightful beneficiaries. The book uses a quantitative methodology that systematically categorises waqf endowments and lawsuits between relatives into analytical classifications to identify patterns in the court records, such as who endowed what to whom and who sued whom for what reason. The empirical findings are presented vividly through microstudies, which reflect the intimacy of the actors devolving properties and arguing over them.
Patterns in waqfs and lawsuits show that although Nablus and Tripoli belonged to the same imperial, cultural and legal zone, and looked similar in demographic composition (mostly Sunni Muslims) and size, the two towns had diametrically opposed visions of organising family and devolving property. The motivation of endowers in both towns was to transmit their property to their children and exclude the agnatic kin who would normally inherit those properties. But the key difference was regarding whom to include or exclude as beneficiaries – especially the access of female lines of descent to the family patrimony, over which relatives frequently sued each other to find new available legal channels within the boundaries of Islamic law. Women in Tripoli were included as beneficiaries in almost all waqfs and one third of them received equal shares to males. On the other hand, 90 per cent of Nabulsi waqfs did not count female children and their progeny as beneficiaries and increasingly so over time. Whereas Tripoli women endowed waqfs at the same rate as men, the rate stayed around 10 per cent for Nablus, declining rapidly and vanishing in the early 1800s. Doumani argues that these differences along with others in beneficiary patterns were the product of specific configurations of kinship, property and power relations in the context of local political economies.
The backbone of Nablus's economy depended on the surplus of the neighbouring villages produced on the rain-fed and state-owned lands. Having no control over these lands, Nabulsi people entered into forward-purchase moneylending contracts to appropriate raw materials, especially olive oil for soap production, a year in advance to run and expand their industries and trade. These activities precipitated fictitious kinship relationships with male household heads of peasant communities through provision of hospitality in the town and frequent visits to countryside to attend weddings, exchange gifts or collect debts. The accumulation and maintenance of trust networks, coupled with intense competition over the surplus, necessitated the concentration of family resources in the hands of the senior male members to increase their working capital. Females, who lacked personal mobility and would harm the family patrimony through exogamous marriage, were excluded. Family in Nablus was considered as a firm based in the house to carve spheres of influences in the town and hinterland as far as possible. Hence, joint households established by brothers or cousins were common and residential compounds had priority in family waqfs. Since the lion's share of wealth went to the elite and large merchant families, the social base of Nabulsi endowers bulged at the top and waqfs were large.
People in Tripoli made their living from several-kilometres-square, privately owned and irrigated urban orchards dedicated primarily to raising mulberry trees for sericulture. Trees, which could be owned separately from the land, were the main source of wealth and the most prestigious items in Tripoli waqfs. Most economic relationships depended on long-term joint cultivation contracts where the working partners planted trees and nursed them for years for which they received half ownership. The existence of these smallholdings created a large middling class endowing small-sized waqfs in Tripoli. In contrast with Nablus, women played a significant role in the political economy of the town. They were dominant in the silk industry both as labourers and as major owners and managers of trees that were next to their houses.
Further commercialisation of agriculture and commodification of land starting in the early decades of the nineteenth century sharpened the patterns of inclusion and exclusion of beneficiaries. In Nablus, joint endowments by male agnates became more common, which made the extended multi-nuclear family the norm and women completely disappear from the waqfs as endowers. On the other hand, the conjugal family continued to be the key to kinship relations in Tripoli as women participated in the economy more. Doumani's point is that these sharp differences were historically contingent, systematic and had already been in play for two centuries. His factually based research reveals that no single set of legal, cultural or religious rules defined kinship, property and gender relations. Therefore, remarkably divergent ways of expressing and organising family, especially through property devolution, suggest that no homogenous Arab or Muslim family existed either before or after the intervention of the West or the alleged ruptures of modernity.
Doumani skillfully narrates an account of social continuity and change by bridging the early modern and modern periods. The author also brings attention to provincial regions that were home to the vast majority of the Ottoman population but are marginalised in the scholarship. The book is a significant contribution to the newly emerging field in Middle Eastern studies that examines the political economy of family and household formation through long-term comparative analysis of demographic and legal resources, among which recent works include Iris Agmon's Family & court (2006) and Kenneth M. Cuno's Modernizing marriage (2015). The rich and diverse bibliography and extensive notes make the book essential for students of family, gender and legal history. Whether the results on Tripoli and Nablus can be generalised for the Ottoman Empire encourages further comparative research.
