JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. BRILL is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. Women have generally been considered by modern western observers to occupy a despised and servile position in the social and economic order of Islamic civilization. Arabists and anthropologists have been in accord thatMuslim women were virtually the property first of their *) Kayseri sicils are housed in the Etnografya Muzesi in Ankara, the Karaman, Isparta, and Konya sicils are in the Mevlana Muzesi in Konya, the Amasya sicils in the museum of Tokat, and the Trabzon sicils in the Topkapi Saray Muzesi Arsivi in Istanbul. I wish to thank the directors and their staffs for generous hospitality; I am particularly obligated to the staff of the Etnografya Muzesi, including the director Bayan Enise Yener and the recently retired assistant director Bay Ziya Ceran. This research was supported by grants from the American Research Institute in Turkey and from the University of California at Los Angeles (an NDEA title IV grant). This paper is built upon a chapter from my Ph. D. dissertation in Islamic Studies at UCLA, "The Judicial Registers (Ser'i Mahkeme Sicilleri) of Kayseri (1590-I630) as a source for Ottoman History" (1972). At that stage it profited from readings by Professors S. J. Shaw and S. Vryonis, Jr. Abbreviations: bn = son of; bint = daughter of; v. = veled = son of. In Ottoman documents after 16oo, bn is used for Muslims and veled for zimmis (non-Muslims).Archival sources are cited as follows: 15 5 6-4 means Kayseri sicil number 15, page 5 6, entry 4. When a sicil from a collection other than that of Kayseri is cited the name of the city is always identified. The pages in most volumes are not numbered; in such cases the author began counting with the first page containing court business. Cases cited in the text have been summarized selectively on the basis of their importance and relevance to the topic. It should be noted that a verdict is not a part of the formal registration of cases in the sicils. fathers or older brothers and then of their husbands, that Muslim women were not able to manage or control any of their own property and, in fact, were usually denied the inheritance to which the Koran entitled them, and that they even had no say in their marriages, into which they were sold by their fathers or guardians. From its beginning to the present day Islam has supposedly heaped indignities and scorn upon women. They are held to have been utterly unable to challenge or even question the authority of their fathers, brothers, and husbands 1).This study of the position of women is based primarily on the judicial records (sing. sicil) of the O...

This essay is an examination of the implications of the largely uncritical taking up of the ascendant Agambenian paradigm in recent scholarship. Following Arendt, it is argued that the most important reason for the success of the polemical redefinition of political community as subjecthood by those who elaborated the project of political modernity (esp. Bodin and Hobbes) has been its success at getting its opponents (e.g. Locke,

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. BRILL is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.

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