Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
2009, vol. 4
Dowering Elite Palestinian Women
Judith Tucker
The groom is the rashīd (mentally mature) youth, Salāh al-dīn, son of
the merchant `Umar Ya`īsh. The bride is the pride of the cloistered
women, the lady Khadīja, daughter of the pride of the noble descendants of the Prophet, the lord Hāshim al-Hanbalī, a virgin in her legal
majority. The dower is 100 Venetian gold ducats, a kaftān, a silk pinafore, a carpet, a belt, twenty ratels (1 ratel=2.88 kilo.) of wool, twenty
ratels of cotton, ten robes, and a brown slave to attend her. She takes
immediate possession of 60 gold (ducats) and the above-mentioned
goods and the slave, as acknowledged by her agent. . . .
(End of Rabi` I 1138/December 1725) 1
W
hat kinds of material goods could well-placed women hope to
acquire by way of dower payments? And what do these goods
signal about the expectations that these brides, or perhaps more importantly those who dowered them, brought to the marriage? What do dower
goods have to tell us about the kinds of things women owned and used
and the way these things signaled a new identity for a bride? Based on a
set of nine marriage contracts for Muslim women from elite families in
the Palestinian town of Nablus in the 1720s, I would like to hazard some
observations about dowers and material culture.2
Marriage, including the dower it entailed, offered women an important opportunity to acquire material possessions. Islamic law stipulated
that all marriages must include a dower specified in full detail in the mar-
241
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Judith Tucker
riage contract, to be paid by the groom to the bride at the time of mutual
agreement to that contract.3 The dower, which might legally be comprised
of money, goods, or even services, became the personal property of the
bride who, as long as she had obtained her legal majority, exercised full
control over all she acquired as dower. By the early eighteenth century, the
practice of deferring payment of a portion of the dower until such time as
the marriage ended in death or divorce appears to have been the standard
practice. The proportion of dower so deferred could vary, but roughly a
third of the monetary portion of the dower seemed to prevail and it came
due at the time of divorce or as a priority claim on the estate of a deceased
husband.4
The dower goods listed in the marriage contract presented above are
fairly typical of the goods we find in five different marriage contracts that
united the offspring of Nablus’s elite in the 1720s. There was some variation:
the number of robes might be doubled, the kaftan might be heavily embroidered, a set of plates or a male slave might be included. But when goods
are specified, there is a fair degree of consistency. Dower goods consisted
almost exclusively of a narrow range of items, namely articles of personal
dress, many of them decorated or otherwise luxurious, bulk wool and cotton
intended, most likely, for the making of household mattresses and linens, fine
plates and serving dishes for entertaining, and domestic slaves.5
In four other elite contracts, however, dower goods are omitted in
favor of payment entirely in money and slaves. In one instance, a slightly
larger monetary payment of some 120 as opposed to 100 ducats, and a
male slave in addition to a female slave, more than made up the difference.
In another, the monetary payment of 75 ducats in addition to two slaves,
male and female, probably compensated more or less for the absence of
other goods. In the two remaining contracts, however, the dower is somewhat more modest: 45 ducats and a female slave. I cannot be sure why
some women received dower goods of fancy clothing and linens while others did not. It does seem to be the case that the women at the top end of the
social scale tended to receive goods as well as money and slaves.6 Perhaps
other women had received these goods as marriage gifts separately from
the dower or were being provided these items by their own families. We
do know that it was a common practice, although not required by law, for
Dowering Elite Palestinian Women
243
families to provide their daughters with a trousseau (jih_z) at the time of
their marriages, which could include linens as well as other furnishings.7
The wealthiest families, however, chose to dower their sons’ brides
with not only the expected monetary portion that the young woman would
be able to use for purchases or investments of her choice, but also with the
things that signaled her new position as the wife of a wealthy man. The
elite married woman was to be elegantly arrayed and attended, and her
household was to be abundantly stocked with cloths, covers, and stuffed
mattresses. The goods are primarily connected to the show of prosperity,
finery, and retainers that distinguished the elite household, and the bride
is being prepared to take her place as mistress there. There is never inclusion of productive property, neither tools nor commercial establishments.
Surely these goods communicate a message about her domesticity, albeit
a high-end domesticity in which the bride’s adornment and her freedom
from domestic labor are being underscored. And they accentuate her identity as an upper class “cloistered woman” whose married life will be lived in
the lofty seclusion of an elite household.
But dower goods were not all that women came to own, and the message of elite domesticity was diluted by a woman’s opportunity to acquire
other types of property. Islamic inheritance law, by assigning shares in
every estate to specified heirs and strictly limiting bequests, gave women
significant rights.8 Although most women stood to inherit half the share
of the corresponding male relative—sons inherited twice the portion of a
parent’s estate as did daughters, for example—they were guaranteed shares
in all types of property, including domiciles, shops, mills, etc.9 Unlike
dower goods, however, there is much to suggest that they did not always
retain ownership. The same court registers that recorded these marriage
contracts also contained real estate transactions, and we find women
actively engaged in buying and selling urban properties. Women appear
more often as sellers than as buyers, however, prompting the speculation
that they were selling their shares in inherited property to co-heirs or other
relatives. Still, certainly some women were using their capital, most likely
from dowers and inheritance, to purchase houses and invest in real estate.
Although we do not have a systematic study of women’s property holdings from this time and place, studies of women’s estates and economic activi-
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Judith Tucker
ties elsewhere in the region suggest that women added to their dower goods
over the course of their lives in particular ways.10 Most elite women’s estates
contained not only the fancy clothing, household furnishings, and domestic
slaves we might expect, but also gold and silver jewelry, real estate, and capital
in the form of loans and savings. Jewelry was a common marriage gift, given to
the bride by her groom and her own relatives during the ceremonies leading
up to the consummation of the marriage.11 Despite evidence of a tendency
to liquidate shares in inherited property, women remained very active in the
urban real estate market, as demonstrated by their ownership of substantial
properties in every city and town historians have studied in detail. And court
proceedings attest to the many loans women made to family members as well
as non-family business associates, loans that reflect investments in a world of
commerce well outside the confines of the household.12
So, while the dower goods of elite women strongly associated them
with a material culture of the home, with objects of personal adornment
and household appointment, there were countervailing forces. Legal doctrines and institutions that buttressed women’s inheritance rights, local
customs of gift giving, and women’s own strategies to deploy the capital
they gained through dower and inheritance supply us with a very different picture of what a given woman could acquire. The study of material culture as reflected in the dower paints a picture of the secluded elite
woman tucked away in luxurious household surroundings, but this image
is immediately belied by the wide range of possibilities for the acquisition
of productive property that were open to her. These are tensions familiar
to those of us who study the complex nature of elite women’s lives in the
early modern Middle East and elsewhere.
Notes
1. Mahkamah Nablus, sijill #4 (1135–38), p. 269.
2. The nine marriage contracts were recorded on the following pages in the
registers of the Nablus Islamic court: sijill 3, p. 8, and sijill 4, pp. 127, 142, 201, 216, 254,
269, 297, and 326.
3. For the doctrine on dower in Islamic law, see Judith E. Tucker, Women, Family,
and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 46–47.
4. For discussions of Muslim dower practices in early modern times, see Abdal-
Dowering Elite Palestinian Women
245
Rehim Abdal-Rahman Abdal-Rehim, “The Family and Gender Laws in Egypt during the
Ottoman Period,” in Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History, ed. Amira
Sonbol (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 103; Svetlana Ivanova, “The Divorce
between Zubaida Hatun and Esseid Osman Aga,” in Women, the Family, ed. Sonbol, ,
115; and Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman
Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 52–55.
5. There is little evidence for the presence of slaves in this period in Palestine
aside from a small number employed in domestic service in elite households. Although
the origins of such domestic slaves were not specified, Islamic law forbade the enslavement of Muslims or protected minorities living under Muslim rule. We may assume that
the domestic slaves mentioned in these dowers were most likely Africans of sub-Saharan
origin who had been imported into the area through trade routes running through Egypt
or the Arab Peninsula. For an expanded discussion of the slave trade in this period, see
Terence Walz, Trade between Egypt and Bilad as-Sudan, 1700–1820 (Cairo: Institut francais d’archeologie orientale du Caire, 1978).
6. Among poorer families, dower practices seem to have favored a monetary payment only, although simple, practical goods might be included as well.
7. On the significance of trousseau for elite brides, see Yossef Rapoport,
Marriage, Money, and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 12–13. For trousseau practices in Ottoman Syria and Palestine,
see Tucker, In the House of the Law, 55–57.
8. For an expanded discussion of women’s rights to inheritance in Islamic legal
doctrine, see Tucker, Women, Family, and Gender, 138–40.
9. On Islamic inheritance law, see Noel J. Coulson, Succession in the Muslim
Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), chapters 2 and 8.
10. See, for example, Haim Gerber, “The Social and Economic Position of
Women in Ottoman Bursa, 1600–1700,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 12,
no. 3 (1980): 231–44; and Fatma Müge Goçek and Marc David Baer, “Social Boundaries
of Ottoman Women’s Experience in Eighteenth-Century Galata Records,” in Women in
the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era, ed. Madeline Zilfi
(Leiden: Brill, 1997), 48–65.
11. Although there is no formal period of betrothal in Islamic law, it was customary in Palestine for the groom to send the bride and her family a number of gifts in
the interval between the signing of the marriage contract and the consummation of the
marriage. See Tucker, In the House of the Law, 55.
12. See, for example, Mary Ann Fay, “From Concubines to Capitalists: Women,
Property and Power in Eighteenth-Century Cairo,” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 3
(1998): 118–40; Abraham Marcus, “Men, Women, and Property: Dealers in Real Estate
in Eighteenth Century Aleppo, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 18,
pt. 1 (1983): 136–63; and Margaret L. Meriwether, “Women and Economic Change in
Nineteenth Century Syria: The Case of Aleppo,” in Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New
Frontiers, ed. Judith Tucker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 65–80.