Abstract
The study of Islamic ethics has seen a proliferation of foundational contributions that seek to bring sophisticated ethical theory to the works and concerns of premodern Muslim authors in recent years. Marion Katz’s new book, Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics before Modernity, is no exception to that trend. Carefully engaging scholars from the different legal schools and across the formative to the postclassical period of Islamic law, Katz examines jurists’ position on whether wives should receive monetary compensation for the completion of domestic tasks. However, rather than solely focus on the work of legal scholars, Katz sets the matter of wives and work in conversation with other ethically relevant normative discourses that informed the jurists’ concerns and thinking—such as zuhd (renunciation), falsafa (classical Islamic philosophy), or khidma (service). In juxtaposing premodern jurists’ approach to the issues of wives’ domestic labor with other relevant discourses at the time, Katz seeks to illuminate the relationship between Islamic law and ethics, as well as push against the idea that “classical Islamic law monolithically denies that wives have any obligation to do housework for their husbands”; instead, she seeks to show that the question of obligation to housework “was subject to serious reflection and debate” (1). Instead of reiterating the often-hailed deep intertwining of premodern Islamic legal and ethical thinking, Katz concludes that Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh’) and ethics were relatively distinct. Through her engagement with “multiple, largely autonomous and yet often complementary forms of Islamic normativity” (14) on the question of the domestic labor of women, she sees the relation between Islamic law and Islamic ethics not as “a seamless whole or an unproblematic synthesis” but rather as a “complex negotiation that could strategically highlight different discourses in different contexts” (15). This work thus adds its voice to an emerging consensus highlighting the pluralistic nature of value construction in Islamic thought or what she calls “ethical pluralism” (16)—“the ways in which different ethical frameworks complement or inform legal analyses of the marital relationship” (16).
The first chapter of Katz’s book contrasts zuhd (renunciation) literature and Islamic legal doctrine from eighth- and ninth-century Mālikīs scholars. The two genres “take profoundly divergent approaches to the question of who should perform mundane daily chores and why” (40). Zuhd literature was highly concerned with the morality of accepting labor from servants. The school’s legal doctrine, in contrast, was concerned with the relationship between wealth and/or status and the acceptance of domestic labor from servants. Chapter two moves on to explore Islamic philosophical thought on love and marriage between the fourth/tenth century and the fifth/eleventh century in Baghdad. Classical Islamic philosophy, highly influenced by Greek philosophy, regarded women as the ideal candidates to perform domestic labor. This was, in part, due to wives’ ability to cultivate meaningful connections through domestic service. The legal doctrine was clear in its position that marriage only bought a husband sexual access to his wife. In theory, a wife’s labor was her own. Chapter three continues to focus on the approach of fifth/eleventh-century jurists, but it gives attention to jurists in Khurasan. Khidma (service) is central to the third chapter which also examines the relationship between gender and rank for women and their work. Chapter four, lastly, is centered around “the postclassical period” of Islamic law and examines the changing attitudes towards wives and the debates surrounding compensation for their domestic labor (37). The thirteenth and fourteenth century saw Ibn Taymīya (d. 728/1328) dismantle the separate ethical and legal spheres. The scholar maintained that wives had an obligation to provide domestic labor for their husbands while their husbands were, in return, obligated to provide sex and support for their wives.
To illustrate the depth and richness of Katz’s engagement with the questions surrounding wives and work, we want to highlight the third chapter of Wives and Work which, as stated above, is largely dedicated to the views of the Ḥanafī school jurist al-Sarakhsī (d. 483/1090). By the fifth/eleventh century khidma, which al-Sarakhsī drew on in his legal works, was central to understanding marriage and other hierarchical relationships. Katz argues that this shows that the moral and legal realms were not in isolation for al-Sarakhsī. For example, Katz recognizes that the jurist “does not consider the wife to be contractually obligated to provide household services” (137). However, she also acknowledges how religious obligations complicate a woman’s duties in the home for al-Sarakhsī and his legal viewpoint. For example, al-Sarakhsī views a woman as being religiously obligated to breastfeed, which demonstrates her commitment to God. However, a woman cannot be forced to breastfeed by law. Additionally, a woman cannot request financial compensation for breastfeeding. The jurist saw critical distinctions between moral or religious obligations and legally enforceable duties. Even so, the two realms affected one another, for there are “obligations that are not legally enforceable but nevertheless have concrete legal consequences” (144). The example of a woman’s duty to breastfeed exemplifies this element. This chapter counters claims that “classical Islamic law monolithically denies that wives have any obligation to do housework for their husbands” (1). It was, indeed, much more complex as shown through the examination of al-Sarakhsī settlement on an arrangement that includes both contractual and moral elements.
We would like to particularly point out the usability of the conclusion for those interested in the larger issue of Islamic ethics as an emerging field, its history, and some of its current debates—chiefly the question of the relationship between Islamic law and ethics. Katz shows how the texts synthesized in her book “have been reappropriated and reframed in subsequent centuries” (196). Katz examines the “reappropriation” and “reframing” of the texts between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and finally, their current use. For example, Katz discusses how premodern legal doctrine was used in the twentieth century for and by Muslims to advocate for “legislation enhancing the financial rights of divorced and widowed women” (206). Additionally, she returns to the issue of the relationship between Islamic law and ethics and argues that “the modern period has seen the reconfiguration of an already complex Islamic normative discourse” rather than “ushering in an unprecedented bifurcation of law and ethics” (206). In arguing so, Katz challenges influential ideas advanced by Talal Asad, Wael Hallaq, and others that the colonial context ruptured ethics from law, ending a previous synthesis of the two in premodern shari’a. Looking at debates over the question of women and work in the premodern period exposes “a plurality of discourses that pursue different objectives and address different concerns” (209), rather than a neat synthesis of law and ethics. Trying to conceive of the relation between Islamic law and Islamic ethics, Katz argues that we should think of “a more complex constellation of autonomous yet overlapping normative Islamic discourses that were refigured and redistributed in modernity” (216) in a variety of ways.
While there is no doubt that Wives and Work is a monumental contribution to both scholarship on the domestic duties of women and larger, methodological issues that animate the field of Islamic ethics, it does not work as an introduction to the study of Islamic ethics for the uninitiated. Most importantly, the work lacks a definition of what the author counts as ‘ethics.’ Considering that ethics is a central concept of the book, it would have been useful to provide at least a set of questions or concerns that primarily fall into the area. In the introduction, Katz draws on Zahra Ayubi’s work to show that Islamic ethics is “a broad concept” (17) that draws on a variety of disciplines ranging from kalām and fiqh’ to taṣawwuf and akhlāq. However, the relative scarcity of further information makes it apparent that this book would not appropriately serve students or scholars outside of Islamic studies who, more than likely, have only a limited understanding of the subject. That being said, in the recent line of foundational works on Islamic ethics that are both textually grounded and methodologically sophisticated, Wives and Work takes a well-deserved spot. Particularly in its focus on the question of the relation between Islamic law and Islamic ethics, Katz’s book makes a crucial and surely lasting impression on the field.