NMC308H1

Getting Justice: Women, Slaves, and Religious Minorities in the Courts in the Pre-modern Middle East

Legal systems play an important role in the lives of vulnerable people. Courts both enforce laws which render people vulnerable in the first place and also help protect those same people from further harm. Because legal documents constitute our main source of information about the experiences of lower-status people, they are also important for historians of the Middle East. In this course, we use legal documents to learn about women, slaves, and non-Muslims. Students learn about women’s personal and property rights, their roles as petitioners and witnesses, and the intersection of public legal appearances with modesty concerns. We examine how enslaved people accessed court systems, and how the law treated those who were considered both possessions of others and, at the same time, possessors of free will. Finally, we explore the dhimma system; the existence of separate, non-Muslim laws and courts; and the experiences of non-Muslims in Islamic courtrooms.