At present, most discussions of Islamic law, women, and gender gravitate toward a set of issues assumed to lie at the heart of gendered Islamic discourse: gender segregation and/or female seclusion and veiling, and strict rules and sanctions for sexual behavior are the hot topics of the day, the emblems of Islamic discrimination against, and oppression of, women. I want to emphasize at the outset, however, that this basket of issues was not much featured in traditional legal discourse and premodern legal practices. Jurists, and many Muslim societies, did hold some definite ideas about the gendering of social space, dress requirements, and the gravity of sexual transgressions, but by and large these are ideas developed on the margins of the legal discourse and judges and courts do not seem particularly active in their enforcement. This is an area where modern concerns – perhaps we could say obsessions – threaten to skew our understanding of Islamic law, and therefore I proceed to discuss these issues with the caveat that I will be paying them, relatively speaking, far more attention than did the jurists and courts of premodern Islam.

In addition, any discussion of space and sexuality in Islamic law is complicated by the problem of concepts and terms. Feminist historians and legal thinkers in the West, beginning in the 1960s, worked with the rich analytical approach of public and private domains, where the concept of “separate spheres” for men and women ruled, as essential to our understanding of the ways women were restricted and controlled.