Wives and Work - by Marion Holmes Katz (Paperback)

About the Book

It is widely held today that classical Islamic law denies that wives have any obligation to do housework. Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives' domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics.

Book Synopsis

It is widely held today that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do housework. Wives' purported exemption from domestic labor became a talking point among Muslims responding to Orientalist stereotypes of the "oppressed Muslim woman" by the late nineteenth century, and it has been a prominent motif in writings by Muslim feminists in the United States since the 1980s.

In Wives and Work, Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives' domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics. She reconstructs a complex discussion among Sunni legal scholars of the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE and examines its wide-ranging implications. As early as the ninth century, the prevalent doctrine that wives had no legal duty to do housework stood in conflict with what most scholars understood to be morally and religiously right. Scholars' efforts to resolve this tension ranged widely, from drawing a clear distinction between legal claims and ethical ideals to seeking a synthesis of the two. Katz positions legal discussion within a larger landscape of Islamic normative discourse, emphasizing how legal models diverge from, but can sometimes be informed by, philosophical ethics. Through the lens of wives' domestic labor, this book sheds new light on notions of family, labor, and gendered personhood as well as the interplay between legal and ethical doctrines in Islamic thought.

Review Quotes

This highly readable work by Marion Holmes Katz is sure to be an instant classic in Islamic
studies.

-- "Speculum"

[A] rigorous and impressive display of primary source material.-- "Medieval Encounters"

The book is a refreshing read and the author has done full justice to the topic.-- "The Muslim World Book Review"

This book is a solid scholarly contribution to Islamic studies and to anthropology of religion and law. It is also an excellent read for a general public interested in Islamic ethics.-- "Journal of Oriental and African Studies (JOAS)"

The entire work makes for excellent reading for graduate-level syllabi. Here too, due to the breadth, depth, and richly intersecting bodies of literature that Katz explores, the text will likely invite conversations.-- "Journal of Islamic Ethics"

A valuable, frequently surprising book that will attract scholars of law and ethics broadly define as much as specialists in premodern Islamic legal history and philosophy. Highly Recommended.-- "Choice"

By providing intensive and wide coverage of this issue, the book provides a major investigative tool into the interaction between law and economic realities. It portrays the legal content less as a theoretical framework, and more as a realistic approach to the dichotomy that economics and law were confronting together when change occurred.-- "Reading Religion"

This groundbreaking book makes a significant contribution to the already-rich field of medieval Islamic ethics and law; moreover, Katz's nuanced approach to the many valences of domestic labor has important implications for our understanding of medieval Islamic piety, particularly how pious norms are shaped by class, gender, and social status.

--Karen Bauer, author of Gender Hierarchy in the Qur'an: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses

Why should a wife do housework for free? In this illuminating book, Marion Katz analyzes in depth medieval Muslim intellectuals' nuanced answers to this fundamental question. She demonstrates how they distinguished ethical duties from legal obligations and ultimately reimagined the meaning of marriage and the value of service. An exciting contribution to scholarship on Islamic law and gendered labor.

--Leor Halevi, author of Modern Things on Trial: Islam's Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935

Written by one of the best Islamic studies scholars working today, this is a clear, well-organized, amply documented, and nuanced account of how Muslim jurists dealt with the question of wives' domestic responsibilities, illustrating brilliantly that jurisprudence was only one among many authoritative 'religious' discourses.--Kecia Ali, author of Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam

About the Author

Marion Holmes Katz is a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University. Her books include The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (2007), Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice (2013), and Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (Columbia, 2014).