Marion Holmes Katz's Books

Body of Text

The Emergence of the Sunnī Law of Ritual Purity

By: Marion Holmes Katz

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Body of Text

The Emergence of the Sunnī Law of Ritual Purity

By: Marion Holmes Katz

Ritual purity is one of the least understood aspects of Islamic law and practice, yet it enjoys a prominent place in traditional legal texts and permeates the daily life of ordinary believers. Body of Text examines the emergence and crystallization of the law of ritual purity, using early sources to reconstruct the formative debates among Muslim scholars. The lively interaction among legal theorizing, caliphal politics, and popular practice illustrates the formation of the law, because as scholars strove for synthesis, they advanced competing understandings of the underlying structure and meaning of ritual purity. Katz demonstrates that no single theory can adequately interpret the diversity of opinion within the tradition.

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Page Count

286

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791488578

ISBN 13

9780791488577

Wives and Work

Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity

By: Marion Holmes Katz

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Wives and Work

Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity

By: Marion Holmes Katz

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.

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Page Count

202

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231556705

ISBN 13

9780231556705

Women in the Mosque

A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice

By: Marion Holmes Katz

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Women in the Mosque

A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice

By: Marion Holmes Katz

Juxtaposing Muslim scholars' debates over women's attendance in mosques with historical descriptions of women's activities within Middle Eastern and North African mosques, Marion Holmes Katz shows how over the centuries legal scholars' arguments have often reacted to rather than dictated Muslim women's behavior. Tracing Sunni legal positions on women in mosques from the second century of the Islamic calendar to the modern period, Katz connects shifts in scholarly terminology and argumentation to changing constructions of gender. Over time, assumptions about women's changing behavior through the lifecycle gave way to a global preoccupation with sexual temptation, which then became the central rationale for limits on women's mosque access. At the same time, travel narratives, biographical dictionaries, and religious polemics suggest that women's usage of mosque space often diverged in both timing and content from the ritual models constructed by scholars. Katz demonstrates both the concrete social and political implications of Islamic legal discourse and the autonomy of women's mosque-based activities. She also examines women's mosque access as a trope in Western travelers' narratives and the evolving significance of women's mosque attendance among different Islamic currents in the twentieth century.

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Page Count

433

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231537875

ISBN 13

9780231537872

The Birth of The Prophet Muhammad

Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam

By: Marion Holmes Katz

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The Birth of The Prophet Muhammad

Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam

By: Marion Holmes Katz

Providing a study of the Mawlid or celebration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday from its origins to the present day, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary Muslim devotional practices.

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