The subject of women's history and their daily, legal and legal practices in pre-modern Arab and Islamic countries continues to attract the masses of readers and researchers alike.

This is in order to know how women lived in the Middle East over the centuries that a good number of historians described as eras of backwardness, decadence, and erosion of women’s rights, especially in the era of Ottoman Egypt (1517-1805AD).

There are various important questions that need to be answered when we discuss the history of women in those eras.

How did she live?

How are you raised?

How did you learn?

How did you get married?

How did her husband treat her?

How did the law and the judicial system see it?

Were her human and human rights to education, education, marriage, family care and independent financial disclosure preserved?

Or have these rights been digested and have no relevance to a society in which actual power is concentrated in the hands of men in terms of monopolizing power, weapons, money, and so on?

These are questions that we cannot answer all of them;

There are dozens of contemporary studies that have revealed and revealed the mysteries of that important stage at the hands of great historians, whether in the medieval Islamic ages or the era of the Ottoman Empire. It was the seat of the former Mamluk state that was overthrown by the Ottomans and annexed its countries on the one hand, and on the other hand, as a result of the huge amount of documents that were recorded since that era and in which the Sharia courts played an effective role in documenting contracts and separating the disputants in daily life.

Egyptian historians relied on this treasure of historical information that simplified the social life of the Egyptians in the Ottoman era, and the role of the judiciary and courts in the “street” plots, or the larger courts such as the Military Division, or the Sublime Porte Court, as well as regional courts such as Alexandria, Damietta, Assiut and others .

This is in addition to the important historical sources at that stage, such as what was written by "Abu Al-Surour Al-Bakri", "Al-Shabrawi", "Al-Jabarti" and others in the history of this stage.

In light of this, the issue of a woman’s right in personal issues such as marriage, divorce, khul’, annulment, and the remedy of the judiciary for her in that era, can be an important and attractive topic given the existence of various examples of documents that revealed to us this exciting and daily aspect in the social life of Egyptian women four years ago. Centuries, a situation similar to the situation of Muslim women in Iraq, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa under the Ottoman Empire, which was concerned with documentation, archiving and recording, unlike the Mamluk state, which neglected these aspects.

Women's social conditions and the issue of marriage

The documents tell us that the conditions of Egyptian women in the Ottoman era differed according to their social status, between wealth and poverty, and between the inhabitants of cities such as Cairo, Damietta, and Alexandria, and the inhabitants of the countryside and deserts, as well as the differences between Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt.

The women of the wealthy class, the wives and maidservants of senior princes and officials, were living a luxurious life in that era.

However, they could rarely leave the house to go to the public baths or visit relatives in bus processions, and they were subject to rapid fluctuation, as it was common in the wars of the Mamluks to seize the money and concubines of the defeated and killed.

As for the women of the poorer social classes, they were shoulder to shoulder in helping their wives at home or in the countryside, but we note that women’s rights before the judiciary were preserved, especially with the entry of the Ottomans into Egypt. They were interested in documentation and archiving, especially marriage and divorce contracts and the rest of other transactions in buying and selling Ijarah and other daily and legal transactions, and for this reason we have thousands of documents dating to this stage, and it was noted that the wife’s right from the beginning of the engagement and marriage was preserved through documenting contracts and mandatory in the various Sharia courts for the different classes of Egyptian society, rich or poor, civil. Was he a military mother? Even the people of the countryside came from their countries to document marriage contracts in Cairo at times.

For example, the documents of the Najmiya Court of Salhiya, which was located in the center of Cairo on Al-Moez Street, and on November 3, 1552 AD, stated: “Ahmed bin Ali bin Ahmed Al-Hamidi from the people of Al-Mazala district in Fayoum trusted his inviolable fiancée, Ghanaym Al-Bakr, the minor daughter of Muhammad.” Bin Khalid Bin Al-Tajer Al-Humaidi.

In another marriage document, the father was an agent for his son in the same court, and he came from Sharqia to register the contract, where it was written: “Hajj Shuaib bin Khudair bin Ismail from the people of Hatim’s house in Sharqiya in his custody of his minor son, the fiancée of his son, Amna al-Bakr, the minor daughter of Hajj Ismail al-Hijazi.” Al-Qarafi", on January 26, 1546 CE [1].

In the society of Ottoman Egypt, there was complete or almost complete separation between males and females, so the husband was not allowed to see his wife before consummating her, and the definition of the engagement differed according to the prevailing customs and custom. Marriage of children was an absolute right enjoyed by the heads of families. In fact, the consent of the children themselves may not be necessary if they are in the prime of life, and when a person desires to marry, his mother or one of his relatives begins to describe the girl he nominates to marry him by mentioning her conditions, and she may use the “matchmaker.” She is a woman whose job is to help young people get married in return for a gift or a specific wage, and when the two parties agree, the date of the engagement is set, in which the groom’s family meets in their house so that the family and relatives gather and present the duty of gratitude and custom, then they go to the bride’s house, which has been prepared to receive the suitor and his family.] 2] It is a custom that still exists in Egypt to this day.

The ruler “the judge” is considered the guardian of the one who does not have a guardian, and the judge does not marry the woman until he makes sure that the conditions for marrying her are met, whether she is a virgin or a young woman, and we have seen many documents indicating this fact. With his fiancée, Kariyat al-Wo’a bint Abdullah, Atiqa Badriya bint al-Boujani, and he “married her to him with her permission and consent, the Hanafi (judge) al-Zayni Muhammad ibn al-Mawla to rule on the doctrine of Imam Abu Hanifa in this court,” which is the Salhia Najmiyya Court in the center of Cairo [3].

The judge was also the guardian in the marriage of orphans or of unknown parentage, and such marriages received great respect in the Egyptian society at the time, given that the husband who married an orphan was doing an act of righteousness, and the society’s view of the judiciary was a look of respect and appreciation.

It is noteworthy that many cases were observed in which the woman married herself directly, and she often took the dowry herself from the husband, especially the married woman other than the virgin who must have a guardian from the family or from the judges if there were no family for her, she “married The sanctity of the woman’s saddlebag, the daughter of Ahmed bin Abdullah, with her fiancée, Salem bin Abdullah Al-Aswad, by offering herself and accepting himself according to the law,” a document that was registered at the High Gate Court in central Cairo on September 17, 1581 AD.

We find that the marriage of Ottoman officers and soldiers, such as the Janissaries, the "Yangaris", the Sabbah, and others, was subject to the Egyptian judiciary of its various sects at that time.

Al-Sharif Ali bin Al-Sayyid Al-Sharif Muhammad Al-Husseini Al-Yangary "The Janissary" - and this shows us another dimension represented in the joining of the Arab nobles to the most important divisions of the Ottoman army, the Janissaries - with his fiancée Amna, the daughter of the late Ahmed Al-Sebahi, after "she married herself to him in a legal marriage", according to what she reported. Records of the Military Court of Division in Cairo dated October 9, 1592 AD.

In the same context, the woman, Zulaikha, daughter of Shawik bin Abdullah, returned to the infallibility of her first divorced, Al-Zayni Othman, the late Prince Janbek of the Circassian Taif, and he “married him herself on that,” and this was “in the presence of her sanctified mother, the daughter of Nasir al-Din Muhammad al-Manfaluti, bought her and informed her and consented to him.” Shari'a satisfaction", according to the records of the High Gate Court in Cairo on May 28, 1552 AD.

Divorce, annulment and dissolution

If we see a woman’s right to document her marriage, whether virgin or not, then we can also see her rights in divorce and documenting it, and there are hundreds of documents indicating that, in which the admission and injury are acknowledged and the woman acknowledges that she has obtained all her rights, whether by arrest or release, in one of the documents. After her confession of entry and injury and they approved of that, then each of them acknowledged the legal declaration of his health, safety, obedience and choice that he does not deserve before the other an absolute right, nor entitlement, nor claim, nor demand, nor silver, nor copper, nor frozen expenditure.

This legal acknowledgment formulated by the judge indicates his certainty that the woman received all her rights and her dowry before completing the documentation.

At times, the alimony for the infant or the pregnancy was established in the divorce document itself. “He (the husband) decided upon himself, every day, half a silver dirham, for her pregnancy included in it, a legal report,” as we read in one of the documents.

The woman had the right to request the annulment of the marriage for one of its legitimate reasons, such as incompetence or the long legal absence of the husband, or other conditions that were indicated by the jurists in their blogs.

In the Sharia Court of Alexandria in the Ottoman era, we find in one of the provisions of the marriage annulment document: “The aforementioned husband has been absent from his mentioned wife for a period of four years ahead of his history, and left her in the place of his mentioned obedience (in the Alexandrian gap) with her and his minor daughter, without alimony or legal spender, and that He is poor, who has no money, and he has no money or property in the gap, and I do not send her anything to spend on herself and her daughter, and that she is ill and unable to toil and fatigue, and she fears hardship for herself. She bears witness to that after he had been patient and strengthened her with the reward and reward that God Almighty had prepared for those who were patient.” But because the woman insisted on annulment because of the harm inflicted on her, the judge ruled for her what she wanted after he established the validity of the evidence and the statements of witnesses.

Similarly, pre-modern Egyptian women used their right to divorce, a right guaranteed to them by Sharia;

If Islam gave the man the freedom to divorce the wife if he hated living with her, it gave the woman the freedom to ask for the separation of her husband when she was reluctant to live with him, in return for paying him what she had taken from him of the dowry or paying him what they agreed upon Of money, and the khul’ is by mutual consent of the husband and wife. If the consent is not completed, the woman raises her complaint to the judge, and if he is convinced of the wife’s point of view, he may compel the husband to divorce by analogy with the incident that occurred between the companion Qais bin Thabit and his wife when they raised their matter to the Prophet, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him. So, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, decided to separate them in return for the wife returning to her husband the garden that he had made as a dowry for her.

Dr. "Abdul Razzaq Issa" confirms in his book "The Egyptian Woman Before Modernity.. Selections from the Documents of the Ottoman Era" that there are a huge number of documents that he has seen, especially issues of khul', whether among Muslim women or Coptic women who resorted to the Muslim judge to request khul' several centuries ago. It was one of the most important rights that Egyptian women enjoyed at the time.

Women often resorted to the Hanbali judge, whose doctrine provided facilities in matters of khul’;

As khul’ is not considered a divorce according to the Hanbalis. In the court of ancient Egypt in the Ottoman era, we find that the woman “Shams al-Din bint Ibrahim” was asked by her “husband, Ali bin Nasr al-Din bin Muhammad al-Jarhi, to take her off a legitimate divorce, naked from the wording of divorce and his intention on the doctrine of Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal", and the judge ruled that she did [4].

Returning to and reviewing documents is the main pillar on which history in all its forms and schools is based. These documents, which were preserved by us in the records of the civil and military Sharia courts in Cairo and Alexandria during the Ottoman era, since the sixteenth century AD, four hundred years ago, show us the legitimate and human rights that Egyptian women obtained before Modernity, especially in cases of engagement, marriage, divorce, annulment, freedom of litigation, documenting all of this before the state, and defending itself and its legitimate rights in these sensitive personal issues, which refutes many claims that women are oppressed and their rights in those ancient times.

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Sources

[1] The Egyptian National Archives, records of the Najmiyah Court of Salihiya, record 443, Article 248, and record 442, Article 929.

[2] Muhammad Sayed: Marriage in Ottoman Egypt, pg. 30.

[3] The previous source, p. 39.

[4] The Egyptian Woman Before Modernity, pg. 60.