In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,1 Muslim communities in different parts of the world faced a common problemâwomenâs inability to obtain divorce after their husbands went missing. These women, deprived of provision (nafaqa), could neither sustain themselves financially nor remarry. In response to this situation, Muslim scholars, in their respective communities (Egypt, Ottoman Syria, British India and the Russian empire), produced legal decisions (fatwas) to facilitate womenâs divorce. This paper focuses on the responses of Russiaâs Islamic scholars to this problem which were collected and published by a prominent religious scholar of the Volga-Urals, Rizaeddin Fakhreddin. Among Volga-Ural Muslims, this problem was entangled with the question of religious authority under Russian imperial rule. I argue that since Russiaâs legal pluralism and institutionalization of the âulama under the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly were the main reasons behind the inability to solve the problem of womenâs divorce from missing husbands, Fakhreddin initiated this collective deliberation as a preliminary attempt to resolve a legal issue through the consensus (ijmÄâ) of legal experts within the framework of the OA. Finding a solution to the problem faced by the wives of missing husbands was inseparable from the question of the transformation of Islamic religious authority under imperial rule.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Agmon, Iris. 2004. Recording Procedures and Legal Culture in the Late Ottoman ShariÊ¿a Court of Jaffa, 1865â1890. Islamic Law and Society 11/3: 333â377.
Agmon, Iris. 2006. Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in late Ottoman Palestine. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Ali, Kecia. 2006. Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qurâan, Hadith, and Jurisprudence. Oxford: Oneworld.
Ayoub, Samy. 2020. Casting Off Egyptian Ḥanafism: SharÄ«âa, Divorce, and Legal Reform in 20th-Century Egypt. Die Welt des Islams: 1â35.
Azamatov, Danil D. 1999. Orenburgskoe magometanskoe dukhovnoe sobranie v kontse 18-goânachale 20-go vekov. Ufa: Gilem.
Beer, Daniel. 2016. The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars. London: Allen Lane.
Benton, Lauren. 1999. Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State. Comparative Studies in Society and History 41/3: 563â588.
Burbank, Jane. 2006. An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7/3: 397â431.
Commins, David. 1990. Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crews, Robert. 2006. For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. Cambridge, Boston: Harvard University Press.
Cuno, Kenneth M. 2015. Reorganization of the Sharia Courts of Egypt: How Legal Modernization Set Back Womenâs Right in the Nineteenth Century. Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2/1: 85â99.
Dudoignon, Stéphane A. 2006. Echoes to Al-ManÄr Among the Muslims of the Russian Empire: A Preliminary Research Note on Rizaeddin Fakhreddin and the Å Å«rÄ (1908â1918). In Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic World: Transmission, Transformation, Communication, ed. S.A. Dudoignon, K. Hisao and K. Yasushi. London, New York: Routledge: 85â116.
Fakhreddin, Rizaeddin. 1897. Muá¹Älaâa: IdÄra-i IslÄmiyya-i IrÄ«nbÅ«rgiya uzarÄ«na âÄlimlarimiz á¹arafïndan nikÄḥ khuá¹£uá¹£inda yÄzilmish afkÄrlarniñ khulÄsasi jamâ Ä«dilmish risÄladir, Kazan: Dumbrawski.
Fakhreddin, Rizaeddin. 1906. RÅ«siya muslumanlarÄ«niñ iḥtiyÄjlari wa anlar ḥaqinda intiqÄd. Orenburg: Karimiya.
Fakhreddin, Rizaeddin. 1907. IslÄmlar ḥaqinda ḥukÅ«mat tadbÄ«rlarÄ«. Orenburg: Karimov, Khusainov & Co.
Fakhreddin, Rizaeddin. ManÄsib dÄ«nÄ«ya. Orenburg: Orenburg: Karimov, Khusainov & Co.
Fakhreddin, Rizaeddin. 1914. DÄ«nÄ« wa ijtimÄʿī masâalalar. Orenburg: Waqt.
Fakhreddin, Rizaeddin. 2010. ÄthÄr. Kazan: Rukhiyat.
Fakhreddin, Rizaeddin. 1999. Fakhreddin, Tärjema-i hälem. In Rizaeddin Fäkreddin: Fänni-biografik jientik, ed. Raif Mardanov et al.Kazan: Rukhiyat: 7â38.
Garipova, Rozaliya. 2019. Where Did the AÌkhuÌnds Go? Islamic Legal Experts and the Transformation of the Socio-Legal Order in the Russian Empire. Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law 19: 156â182.
Garipova, Rozaliya. 2020. Between Imperial Law and Islamic Law: Muslim Subjects and the Legality of Remarriage in Nineteenth-Century Russia. In SharÄ«âa in the Russian Empire: The Reach and Limits of Islamic Law in Central Eurasia, 1550â1917, ed. Paolo Sartori and Danielle Ross. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 156â182.
Hallaq, Wael. 2009. SharÄ«âa: Theory, Practice, Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jeppie, Shamil, Ebrahim Moosa, and Richard Roberts, ed. 2010. Muslim Family Law in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Legacies and Post-Colonial Challenges, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Kemper, Michael. 1998. Sufis und Gelehrte in Tatarien und Baschkirien, 1789â1889: Der islamische Diskurs unter Russischer Herrschaft. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz.
Kemper, Michael. 2006. Daghestani Sheikhs and Scholars in Russian Exile: Networks of Sufism, Fatwas and Poetry. In Daghestan and the World of Islam, ed. M. Gammer and D.J. Wasserstein. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica: 95â107.
Kugle, Scott. 2001. âFramed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia.â Modern Asian Studies 35/2: 257â313.
Kurzman, Charles. 2002. Modernist Islam, 1840â1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Masud, Muhammad Khalid, Brinkley Messick and David Powers, ed. 1996. Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Masud, Muhammad Khalid. 1996. Apostasy and Judicial Separation in British India. In Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas, ed. M. Kh. Masud, B. Messick and D. Powers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 193â203.
Masud, Muhammad Khalid, Rudolph Peters and David Powers, ed. 2006. Dispensing Justice in Islam: Qadis and Their Judgments. Leiden, Boston: Brill.
Opwis, Felicitas. 2007. Islamic Law and Legal Change: The Concept of Maá¹£laḥa in Classical and Contemporary Legal Theory. In Shariâa: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context, ed. A. Amanat and F. Griffel. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 62â83.
Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii. Sobranie vtoroe. 1836, St. Petersburg; 1837, vol. 11, part 1, 14 (no. 8764).
Roberts, Richard. 1999. Representation, Structure and Agency: Divorce in the French Soudan during the Early Twentieth Century. The Journal of African History 40/3: 389â410.
Sadeh, Roy Bar. 2020. Between Cairo and the Volga-Urals: Al-Manar and Islamic Modernism, 1905â17. Kritika 1/3: 525â553.
Sartori, Paolo. 2016. Visions of Justice: Sharīʿa and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia. Leiden & Boston: Brill.
Sartori, Paolo and Danielle Ross, ed. 2020. SharÄ«âa in the Russian Empire: The Reach and Limits of Islamic Law in Central Eurasia, 1550â1917. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
SavaÅ, Saim. 1992. Fetva ve Åerâiyye Sicillerine Göre Ailenin TeÅekkülü ve DaÄılması. In Sosyo-Kültürel DeÄiÅme Sürecinde Türk Ailesi, ed. Ezel Elverdi. Ankara: BaÅbakanlık Aile AraÅtırma Kurumu: 504â547.
Shablei, Pavel. 2021. Kto garant shariata? Pravovye stolknoveniia v Akmolinske v 1911 godu. In Islam v Rossii i Evrazii, ed. T.V. Kotiukova. St. Petersburg: Aleteia: 189â216.
Skovgaard-Petersen, Jakob. 1997. Defining Islam for the Egyptian State: Muftis and Fatwas of the DÄr al-IftÄ. Leiden: Brill.
Spannaus, Nathan. 2013. The Decline of the ÄkhÅ«nd and the Transformation of Islamic Law under the Russian Empire. Islamic Law and Society 20/3: 202â241.
Spannaus, Nathan. 2020. TaqlÄ«d and Discontinuity: The Transformation of Islamic Legal Authority in the Volga-Ural Region. In SharÄ«âa in the Russian Empire: The Reach and Limits of Islamic Law in Central Eurasia, 1550â1917, ed. Paolo Sartori and Danielle Ross. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 81â119.
Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. X, Part 1, zakony grazhdanskie (Civil Laws) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia vtorogo otdeleniia sobstvennogo ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, 1857): 19â20.
Tucker, Judith. 2008. Women, Family and Gender in Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tuna, Mustafa. 2015. Imperial Russiaâs Muslims: Islam, Empire and European Modernity, 1788â1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Werth, Paul. 2016. The Tsarâs Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zagidullin, Ilâdus. 2009. Deiatelânostâ R. Fakhreddina v orenburgskom mogametanskom dukhovnom sobranii (1891â1906). Nauchnyi Tatarstan 2: 146â158.
Zagidullin, Ilâdus. 2014. Deiatelânostâ orenburgskogo magometanskogo dukhovnogo sobraniia po reformirovaniiu upravleniia dukhovnymi delami musulâman v kontse XIXânachale XX vv. In Iz istorii i kulâtury narodov srednogo povolâzia, 4: 83â121.
Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. 2002. The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. 2006. Consensus and Religious Authority in Modern Islam: The Discourses of the âUlamÄâ. In Speaking for Islam. Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies, ed. G. Krämer and S. Schmidtke. Leiden: Brill: 153â180.
Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. 2007. Ashraf âAli Thanawi. Oxford: Oneworld.
ZeÄeviÄ, Selma. 2007. Missing Husbands, Waiting Wives, Bosnian Muftis: Fatwa Tests and the Interpretation of Gendered Presences and Absences in Late Ottoman Bosnia. In Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History, ed. A. ButuroviÄ and I.C. Schick. London: I.B. Tauris: 335â360.
| å ¨é¨æé´ | è¿å»ä¸å¹´ | è¿å»30天 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| æè¦æµè§æ¬¡æ° | 556 | 118 | 26 |
| å ¨ææµè§æ¬¡æ° | 53 | 15 | 0 |
| PDFä¸è½½æ¬¡æ° | 115 | 19 | 0 |
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,1 Muslim communities in different parts of the world faced a common problemâwomenâs inability to obtain divorce after their husbands went missing. These women, deprived of provision (nafaqa), could neither sustain themselves financially nor remarry. In response to this situation, Muslim scholars, in their respective communities (Egypt, Ottoman Syria, British India and the Russian empire), produced legal decisions (fatwas) to facilitate womenâs divorce. This paper focuses on the responses of Russiaâs Islamic scholars to this problem which were collected and published by a prominent religious scholar of the Volga-Urals, Rizaeddin Fakhreddin. Among Volga-Ural Muslims, this problem was entangled with the question of religious authority under Russian imperial rule. I argue that since Russiaâs legal pluralism and institutionalization of the âulama under the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly were the main reasons behind the inability to solve the problem of womenâs divorce from missing husbands, Fakhreddin initiated this collective deliberation as a preliminary attempt to resolve a legal issue through the consensus (ijmÄâ) of legal experts within the framework of the OA. Finding a solution to the problem faced by the wives of missing husbands was inseparable from the question of the transformation of Islamic religious authority under imperial rule.
| å ¨é¨æé´ | è¿å»ä¸å¹´ | è¿å»30天 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| æè¦æµè§æ¬¡æ° | 556 | 118 | 26 |
| å ¨ææµè§æ¬¡æ° | 53 | 15 | 0 |
| PDFä¸è½½æ¬¡æ° | 115 | 19 | 0 |