The modern “family”
The sense of the word 'aila (translated into English as “family”) as used by Abduh and other reformers is modern—a fact reflected not only in its relatively recent coupling with shanalaw, but also in changing literary Arabic.
Eighteenth-century dictionaries do not give the modern sense of ‘aila and usra, meaning a unit consisting of parents and children. One can see how the modern usage was probably derived: the form ‘iyala is given as meaning “to give help and support to dependents,” but also as “the process of having more children”; usra meant “tribe,” or “agnates” (relatives on the fathers side).56 By the late nineteenth century, ‘a ’ila becomes a part of common usage and generally signifies “a man and his wife and his children and those who are dependent on him from his paternal relatives”57— such as younger siblings or aged parents. A modern dictionary has a definition in terms of unit of habitation: 'a ’ila means “those who are gathered55. Hamid Zaki states that the term al-ahwdl al-shakhsiyya (personal status) is new to Egypt, having been introduced from Europe with the laws now administered by the National Courts, and he notes its absence in the codes administered by the shana courts. Accordingly, he traces the definition of the term through French legal authorities, from the division between “personal status” and “real status” in the Napoleonic Code, to the contemporary recognition of multiple status categories. The term “personal status” (al-ahwdl al-shakhsiyyd) now refers, Zaki notes, to the ensemble of juridical institutions that define the human person independent of his wealth, obligations, and transactions (“Al-Mahakim al-ahliyya wa al-ahwdl al-shakhsiyya,” in Majallat al-qanun wa al-iqtisad, December 1934, pp. 793-95)· This abstraction subverts the old shana categorization of the human person.
In the writings of medieval Islamic jurists the particular categories of male and female, free and slave, are essential to the legal interpretation of the human body, intention, and agency (see Baber Johansen, “The Valorization of the Human Body in Muslim Sunni Law,” in D. J. Stewart, B. Johansen, and A Singer, Law and Society in Islam, Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1996).•>6. See Taj al-‘Uriis. ‘
57. See Muhit al-Muhlt.
together in one house, including parents, children and near relatives.”[130] So much for shifting referents.[131]
The things signified are also being transformed. Social historians have traced the rearticulation of kinship units and networks among the rural population in mid-century and ascribed it both to state and market: forced labor and military conscription, a general decline in the economic condition of handicraft workers and petty traders due to the penetration of European capitalism, as well as the reform of landholding and taxation systems. Thus Judith Tucker notes that although it was common for several brothers to live and work together with their wives and children, sharing goods, livestock, and land in a unit recognized in law as a partnership (shirka), the states draconian measures seriously affected the structure of such units and networks. For example, “Despite the migration of women and children in the wake of drafted husbands in a conscious attempt to maintain the family unit, conscription made inroads on traditional [that is, existing] structures. The military family was a nuclear family; the man, wife and children were removed from their village community, and more importantly, from the extended family which had formed their social and economic environment. A network of economic relations and social responsibilities bound them to their parents, brothers and sisters, and relatives by marriage. The formation of a nuclear family unit at some distance away weakened these ties. If the woman remained without her husband in the village, the mans absence affected patterns of material support and the division of tasks.”[132] (It is of some interest that the "family” makes its appearance as a category in the census registers of Egypt only in 1917.[133])
So if Muhammad Abduh regards the family as the basic unit of society, it is not because he invokes a nostalgic past but because something new is now emerging in the changing social structure.
Among the urban upper classes, Western-type schooling (in European languages) and the adoption of Western domestic styles and manners
Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt 233 also produced a discourse of the ideal family—typically expressed in terms of “the problem of the status of Muslim women”—-among Western- educated reformers in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps the most famous text that exemplifies this is Qasim Amin’s controversial book on Th$ Emancipation ofWomanf1 long regarded as a major step in the history of Egyptian feminism. In a powerful critique of that work, Leila Ahmed has argued that “In calling for women’s liberation the thoroughly patriarchal Amin was in fact calling for the transformation of Muslim society along the lines of the Western model and for the substitution of the garb of Islamic-style male dominance by that of Western-style male dominance. Under the guise of a plea for a ‘liberation of woman, then, he conducted an attack that in its fundamentals reproduced the colonizer’s attack on native culture and society.”63 It was designed, in other words, to help eradicate bad habits among the natives.
Amin’s book is devoted to a sustained condemnation of the seclusion of women (symbolized by the veil) and a reiteration of the condition that makes for happiness in the family. As he puts it, when a “woman learns of her rights and acquires a sense of her self-worth, marriage will become the natural means for realizing the happiness of both the husband and wife. Then marriage will be based on the inclination of two persons to love each other completely—with their bodies, their hearts, and their minds.”64 Thus the nuclear family is the essential site for the happiness of the married couple through the fulfillment of their dreams. The material conditions of their existence are irrelevant. “Look at spouses who love one another, and you will see that they enjoy the blessings of paradise.
What do they care if they are penniless, or if they have only lentils and onions to eat? Their cheerfulness throughout the day is enough for them—a cheerfulness that energizes the body, reassures the self, awakens feelings of joy in life, and renders it beautiful.”65 The core of the happy modern family is a monogamous relationship; a polygynous household can only be a space of conflict, hatred, and misery. But if even monogamous families are not to-62. Qasim Amin, Tahrir al-mar’a, Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif, 1970 [1899]. Amin was a lawyer by profession, initially trained in Egypt but with several years’ further education in France.
63. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 161.
64. Ibid., p. 145.
65. Ibid., pp. 145-46.
day full of happiness and true love, if on the contrary they are usually the site of continuous quarrels, it is because the uncivilized practice of veiling prevents the wife from acquiring the minimal education and from interacting with men in order to make the (middle-class) family successful.66 Ahmed is right to describe Amiris text, with its contempt for Egyptian domesticity and its insistence on the supreme importance of abolishing the veil, as the reproduction of a “Western colonial discourse.” But here I want to focus on something else: the appearance of the conception that love between a man and a woman is the necessary basis of the only kind of family life that can have any value, and the assumption that legal conditions are necessary for ensuring domestic bliss. Of course monogamy in itself is not a Western phenomenon, nor was affection between husband and wife unknown in Egypt until Westernized reformers proposed it—although Amin, like many other Egyptian reformers of his time, believed that that was so. My concern is simply to draw attention to the condition of equality in the mutual sentiments of love between a man and a woman that Amin regards as essential to the private institution called “family”67— and to the fact that this equality is entangled with legal definitions.
It is for this reason—to secure mutual love within a monogamous family—that the reform of marriage and divorce provisions in the sharia
66. The Islamic journal al-Manar, edited by Muhammad Abduh’s disciple Rashid Rida, was very favorable to Qasim Amiris book—as well as to its sequel The New Woman. See Sami Abdulaziz al-Kumi, as-Sahdfa al-islamiyya fi misrfi-l- qam at-tdsi' ‘ ashara, Mansura: Dar al-Wafa’, 1992, pp. 96-97.
67. In his magisterial study of European bourgeois sexuality in the long nineteenth century, Peter Gay observes: “Intimate love, intimate hatred, are timeless; Freud did not name the Oedipus complex after an ancient mythical hero for nothing. But the nineteenth-century middle-class family, more intimate, more informal, more concentrated than ever, gave these universal human entanglements exceptional scope and complex configurations. Potent ambivalent feelings between married couples, and between parents and children, the tug between love and hate deeply felt but rarely acknowledged, became subject to more severe censorship than before, to the kind of repression that makes for neurosis. The ideology of unreserved love within the family was attractive but exhausting. Father s claims on daughters and mothers claims on sons, assertions of authority or demands for devotion often masquerading as excessive affection, acquired new potency precisely as the legal foundations for authority began to crumble. Increasingly, family battles took place, as it were, not in the courtroom, but in individual minds” (The Education of the Senses, New York: Norton, 1984, pp. 444-45).
Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt 235 plays such ail important role throughout Amin’s text. Thus polygyny, which unfortunately for Amin seems to be condoned by the Qur’an, should be legally circumscribed as much as possible. Indeed he argues, like other reformers before and since, that the intention of the relevant Quranic verses is that polygyny be allowed only if it is secured against injustice.
“If there is injustice among the wives as is evident in our times,” Amin writes, “or if moral corruption comes to families from the plurality of wives, and if the limits of the law that should be respected are transgressed, and if there is enmity among members of a single family and it spreads to the point that it becomes general—then it is allowed to the ruler who cares for public welfare \al-maslaha al-'dmma] to prohibit polygyny, conditionally or unconditionally, according to what he sees as suitable to public welfare.”[134] Thus although state legislation is necessary for creating the conditions for moral behavior, the argument for overriding the Quranic permission of polygyny is simply a generalized sense of public welfare that is still justified in Islamic terms.[135] Although, paradoxically, the ideal that exemplifies the solution is the monogamous nuclear family among the Westernized classes (whose men now engage in the publicly regulated professions of law, medicine, the higher civil service), increasingly separated from “public life,” and becoming the principal domain in which moral behavior is to be learned and always to be practiced.