Islamic Mediterranean – serie

Few deny that in the Muslim world religion and law are intimately linked. However, local legal realities mean that Islamic law is often pushed out of the picture by customary law, which is usually tribal, and by state law. Shattering Tradition concentrates on customary law, which is the least investigated of the three, and considers the ruptures and potential for conflict in Muslim law as well as the continuities and interactions. Shattering Tradition is vital reading for all those interested in the social anthropology of the Middle East and the wider study of Islamic law.

Based on original sources, this book questions the conventional wisdom that Mediterranean Muslim women are passive people subjected to the tyranny and misogyny of religion, society and male relatives. Encompassing everything from medieval love poetry to popular literary sources these studies bear witness to the fact that individual women of all social classes play pivotal roles in both the private domains of sociey and in the public realm.

The study of the economic history of Islamic lands before 1800 has lagged behind the political, diplomatic and social history of the same area. This book covers three large topics: land, trades and money. It proposes entirely new perspectives on the non-European experience of ordinary people. This is a view from the inside about economic realities, suggesting ways to understand economic history in a social and cultural context. The first of its kind, it will be of vital use to all students of the area.

Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East presents research on craft workers within and outside the guild structure from the modern and contemporary Mediterranean world. From the late sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire to traditional style crafts in twentieth-century Turkey and Egypt, the book surveys a multitude of traditions. It begins in 1582 when Istanbul artisans paraded in front of Sultan Murad III; moves through to the eighteenth-century struggles between artisans and tax farmers in Tokat, the artisans of Cairo and the craftsmen of Adana; and into nineteenth-century accounts of Istanbul's women workers and Jewish butchers. This book is essential to all those interested in the history of the culture and society of the Islamic Mediterranean.

This text originated from a critique of a liberal understanding of property relation as one between a person and a "thing". States are perceived to be fundamental obstacles on the way to an individual's appropriation of the "thing". State intervention is often considered to be a reason for a presumed absence of private property in non-European contexts. The research presented here contests these assumptions from different perspectives, both in a European and non-European context. As multidisciplinary as it is wide-ranging, the work ranges from practices of the 19th-century Otoman administrative government in the constitution of private property rights to the practice of cadastral mapping in British India. These essays, prepared in collaboration as part of a unified research programme, cover Ottoman and British land laws, property rights in the British colonies, and the notion of property as a contested domain and a site of power relations in 19th-century China.