Women in Classical Islamic Law

Drawing on legal and adth texts from the formative and classical periods of Islamic legal history, this book offers an overview of the development of the questions prominent jurists asked and answered about womens issues. All assumed a woman would marry and thus the book concentrates on womens family life. The introduction establishes the historical framework within which the jurists worked. A chapter on Qurn verses devoted to womens lives is followed by chapters on marriage and divorce which compare the views of jurists during the formative period. The fourth chapter describes the evolution from the formative to the classical periods. The fifth uses material from both periods to describe the array of legal opinion about other aspects of womens lives in and outside their homes. Throughout, jurists opinions are juxtaposed with relevant quotations from contemporaneous adth collections.