Orient
Online ISSN : 1884-1392
Print ISSN : 0473-3851
ISSN-L : 0473-3851
Volume 54
Displaying 1-11 of 11 articles from this issue
Special Issue: Women and Family in Mamluk and Early-Ottoman Egypt, Syria, and Hijaz
  • An Overview of Recent Studies on Women and Family in Mamluk Society
    Daisuke IGARASHI, Takao ITO
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 1-6
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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  • A Statistical Study Based on the Ottoman Land Register Daftar Jayshī
    Wakako KUMAKURA
    Article type: research-article
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 7-22
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    The Daftar Jayshī (Military Register) is a fourteen-volume Ottoman land register that records waqf landed properties and private lands authorized by the government in the middle of the sixteenth century. It provides us not only with records from the time when the register was compiled, but also with Mamluk-period records copied from the Mamluk registers, which gives the source some uncommon features. The present study highlights women’s landholding in the Circassian period based on this source. Unlike studies based on waqf documents, it will analyze collective landholding data rather than detailed individual cases. Hence it is expected to reveal certain patterns and tendencies in women’s landholding and the financial ties within their families.

    Various women who appear in the Daftar Jayshī, such as wives, mothers and daughters of sultans, mamluks and civilians, participated in landholding. Two patterns can be discerned in their financial activities: (1) acquisition of land that had originally been iqṭāʿ, and (2) acquisition of land that had originally been military rizaq (rizaq jayshiyya, military pension). After acquisition, either by purchase from the state treasury or from holders of private land and waqf, they usually turned them into waqf. Although such patterns and processes were similar with men’s cases, the second pattern, acquisition of military rizaq, was more common among women. This indicates it was easy for women to obtain land from which they had benefited, whereas they needed their relatives’ support and familial strategy to obtain land that had originally been iqṭāʿ. However, in all cases, the statistical results show that the women who were able to obtain landed property were only a small proportion of the wealthy and social elite.

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  • Women, Waqf, and Wealth Transmission in Mamluk Egypt
    Julien LOISEAU
    Article type: research-article
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 23-39
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    The paper aims at reappraising the position of women in wealth holding and transmission among the elite families of Mamluk Egypt. It is based on sample surveys of legal documents, both sale and endowment deeds, mainly dating from the ninth/fifteenth century, that are nowadays preserved in Cairo. It argues that at times of high mortality rates, frequent widowhood and remarriage, the Islamic law of inheritance proved to be particularly protective toward the female relatives of a deceased male. In such contexts, pious endowment

    (waqf) was not only an option for management of estates but also used as an alternative, albeit legal, channel of wealth transmission in order to escape the law of inheritance and its adverse effects. In this respect, elite families of Mamluk Egypt, whether they were of local or foreign background, used to share the same concerns and values about family, as evident in the extensive use of the same type of endowment deeds while dealing with their waqf surplus income. This standard form, which is not found in contemporary notarial handbooks such as al-Asyūṭī’s Jawāhir al-ʿUqūd, sheds some light on the effective asset strategies of the ninth/fifteenth-century Egyptian elites. Their “chosen family,” which was outlined in the descriptions of endowment deeds, show several differences from the legal norms of inheritance; for instance, the exclusion from wealth transmission of the deceased’s widow(s) and of the children she/they might have after remarriage and, moreover, the equal treatment of boys and girls in the attribution to the founder’s descendants of his/her waqf’s surplus income.

    The Cairene legal documents also reveal the extent of women’s contribution in dealing with the holding and transmission of wealth in Mamluk society.

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  • A Testamentary Waqf and Its Female Founder/Administrator in Fourteenth-Century Egypt
    Daisuke IGARASHI
    Article type: research-article
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 41-53
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    This paper examines the waqf (religious endowment) deed of Tatarkhān (Cairo, Wizārat al-Awqāf, no. q913), the daughter of the Mamluk amir Ṭashtamur and explains the process by which the testamentary waqf, which was a waqf established based on a waṣiyya (will and testament) was established and enlarged during a forty-eight-year period. It describes the situation of a female founder/administrator of a waqf in late fourteenth-century Egypt.

    In his last will and testament, made on his deathbed, Amir Ṭashtamur directed his will’s executors to buy assets with one-third of his legacy to create an endowed waqf for his tomb and descendants. The executors bought assets, and then one of the executors, al-Sayfī Urūj, endowed some of them as a waqf according to the will. After all of the executors had died, Tatarkhān, the testator’s daughter, became the administrator of the waqf and succeeded to the large number of waqf properties and milk properties to be dedicated to the waqf. She managed the assets as the administrator and she received great financial benefits from the waqf as its (probably sole) beneficiary. Finally, she founded a new tomb for herself and enlarged the waqf for it to respect her father’s will and simultaneously consider her personal benefit after death.

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  • Takao ITO
    Article type: research-article
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 55-73
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    Fāṭima, the granddaughter of the actual last Mamluk sultan Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī, married the Ottoman commander Lālā Muṣṭafā Pasha after the fall of the Mamluk sultanate. In collaboration with her husband, she founded a mosque in Jenin, Palestine, and converted a number of properties in Syria into waqf for supporting this mosque and for other purposes.

    Compared with Lālā Muṣṭafā Pashā’s waqf, that of Fāṭima was modest in size. However, the main objects in both these awqāf were similar. Both Fāṭima’s and Muṣṭafā’s complexes included a mosque, a soup kitchen for the poor, and rooms for travellers. Both were located on the same route from Damascus to Jerusalem. Additionally, a large part of Muṣṭafā’s waqf property was in the same areas as that of Fāṭima’s. The endowments of Fāṭima and Lālā Muṣṭafā Pasha were therefore apparently a joint project, and both were administered together by their heirs, the Mardam Bey family.

    The Mardam Beys became prominent in the middle of the nineteenth century, after they succeeded in having their claim to the endowments of their ancestors Lālā MuṣṭafāPasha and Fāṭima officially authorized. Thereafter, this family has produced a number of notable figures in not only political and economic but also cultural areas in and beyond Syria.

    The present paper examines the deed for Fāṭima’s waqf and traces her family history through other sources in order to contribute to the discussion about women, waqf, and family in Middle East studies.

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  • Gendered Aspects of Bondage and Criminality in the Mamluk Period (648/1250 –922/1517)
    Carl F. PETRY
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 75-84
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    The article will focus on qualities attributed to several female slaves involved in activities labeled criminal or transgressive as depicted in narrative chronicles of the Mamluk period (1250–1517 C.E.). Contemporary narrative authors often attributed a degree of impropriety—and enhanced offensiveness—to transgressions allegedly committed by women, in addition to the generalized concept of ‘social harm’ applicable to acts by either gender: crossing normative boundaries of ‘proper’ decorum specific to women (such as adoption of ‘immodest’ dress, overt self-assertion in the public sphere, or undisguised contradiction of decisions by males). The essay will consider whether narrative authors signaled their sense of violated gendered space through their terminological choices, selection of descriptive detail, or adoption of stylistic devices peculiar to these incidents. That they resorted to these indirect, covert, devices to signal aberrant behavior more often than explicitly denouncing it emerges as a noticeable trend to be considered. Implication rather than condemnation appeared as a more subtle, and possibly effective, means of highlighting departure from behavioral norms.

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  • The Case of Sāra bt. Aḥmad Ibn al-Muzalliq (d. 923/1517)
    Munther H. AL-SABBAGH
    Article type: research-article
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 85-104
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    This paper evaluates the narrative strategy that the Ottoman Shāfiʿī judge and historian Mūsāb. Yūsuf Ibn Ayyūb (d. after 1002/1593–94) employed in his work al-Tadhkira al-Ayyūbiyya, a biographical dictionary of Damascene elites from the 9th/15th through 10th/16th centuries. I study the case of Sāra bt. Aḥmad Ibn al-Muzalliq (d. 923/1517), an elite woman from a leading Damascene merchant family who was memorialized in this work, to understand how Ibn Ayyūb reconfigured the biographies of Sāra’s marriages and patron associations in Shāfiʿī elite circles from an earlier era, to stress his own social, professional and intellectual genealogy among Shāfiʿī notables. By drawing on several historical works from the turn of the sixteenth century, including the notarial diary of Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq, I argue that Ibn Ayyūb both fulfilled, and diverged from, his explicit mission of improving upon the work of Ibn Ṭūlūn, the preeminent historian of early sixteenth-century Damascus. Even though Ibn Ayyūb eschewed Ibn Ṭūlūn’s attention to what the former deemed “unnecessary facts” and verbose style, Ibn Ayyūb borrowed heavily from Ibn Ṭūlūn in both style and content. For his construction of Sāra’s marriages to two key figures of the ʿulamāʾ establishment, Muḥammad b. Ḥasan Ibn al-Muzalliq and Abū Bakr Ibn Qāḍī ʿAjlūn, I illustrate how Ibn Ayyūb implicitly historicized the Ibn al-Muzalliq family through the lens of his own strained association with Sāra’s grandson, a minor judge in late sixteenth-century Syria, and downplayed the Ibn al-Muzalliq’s earlier prominence in favor of Sāra’s second marriage union to Abū Bakr Ibn Qāḍī ʿAjlūn, a figure to whom Ibn Ayyub painted a close family connection.

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  • Kaori OTSUYA
    Article type: research-article
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 105-125
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    Although many studies have argued for the frequency of cousin marriages and the significant role of marriage as an opportunity for employment or alliance between two families, extensive case studies on marriages within scholarly families have not been conducted. This paper is a case study on the marriages of four Meccan scholarly families from the mid-thirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries: the Ṭabarī family, the Nuwayrī family, the Fāsī family, and the Ẓuhayra family. It aims to examine the basic characteristics of these marriages, including the rate of consanguineous marriages and cousin marriages, and to reveal what kind of marriage strategies each family employed. This study is based primarily on the biographical dictionaries composed by contemporary intellectuals.

    This study found that, first, each family utilized different marriage strategies. For example, as the only Ḥasanid sharīf family among these four families, the Fāsī family tried to connect with the family of the Meccan amirs who were also the Ḥasanid sharīfs.

    Second, regarding the general tendency, nearly half of those with marriage records married their paternal relatives, and more than one third of consanguineous marriages were with sons and daughters of paternal uncles. The daughters of Shāfiʿī judges were apparently the most preferred candidates from other families. Among male members of the four scholarly families who married daughters of the Shāfiʿī judges, two-thirds succeeded in attaining the position of judge or deputy judge. In addition, around 40 percent of these men were sons of deputy judges. This indicates that judges and deputy judges tried to keep the legal offices within their extended families. Thus, extended households seem to have had a major role in marriages.

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  • Marriage as a Disaster Mitigation Strategy
    Erina OTA-TSUKADA
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 127-144
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    The Muzhir family (Banū Muzhir) was an elite Arab-Muslim civilian family in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, which produced six kātib al-sirrs (chief-secretary) of Damascus and Cairo for four generations. In the fifteenth-century Mamluk government, a large payment was required to assume a high-ranking office, and bureaucrats also faced the risk of arbitrary discharge and confiscation. In those situations, individuals needed to establish relationships with prominent figures in the government to seek recommendations and intercession. For this purpose, they used their family line as a ‘survival strategy,’ and marriage played a significant role in mitigating the potential extinction of a family line or a sudden downfall.

    This paper begins to reconstruct the chronological process of how this family of Syrian origins established a foothold in Cairo. We then attempt to clarify the meaning of marriage for bureaucrat families by focusing on how their personal relationships, built by marriage, worked to develop members’ careers in the family line and thus served as safety nets against potential crises.

    Banū Muzhir was counted as one of the most prestigious bureaucrat families in fifteenth-century Cairo. However, our investigation shows that they had largely sustained their genealogy by relying on connections built through marriage. For them, the most important factor for developing the careers of young family members, in addition to their father’s legacy and administrative offices, was to succeed in human relationships. They succeeded strategically through renewed relationships with other prominent civilian families built in the previous generations, and expanded these by concluding marriages. Their extended family networks served as safety nets to cope with the unstable situations of the fifteenth century; among these, marriage was of the utmost importance among bureaucrat families.

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Article
  • Hideyuki IOH
    Article type: research-article
    2019 Volume 54 Pages 145-172
    Published: March 31, 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: May 15, 2021
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    Today, ṣadaqa is commonly defined as voluntary alms, and zakāt as obligatory alms. However, their nature was totally different in the time of the prophet Muḥammad; zakāt was always a form of voluntary alms, while conversely, ṣadaqa in Muḥammad’s last years was a compulsory tax levied especially for the expenditure of jihād. Early Muslim scholars, particularly in Arabia and Iraq, had disliked the tax due to the central government and endeavoured for a long period to exclude from ṣadaqa the nature as a tax due. I will investigate below the process how ṣadaqa changed by nature in the early Islamic period.

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