In Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics before Modernity, Marion Holmes Katz challenges colonial modernity's perceived imposition of the binary of law and ethics on Islamic thought. Highlighting how premodern Muslim jurists, ethicists, preachers, ascetics, devotees, and laypeople resorted to nonlegal frameworks to define marital duties, Katz complicates the juristic consensus that housework is nonobligatory for Muslim wives. The book uses a few pre-Ottoman fiqh texts from four Sunni legal schools to analyze how Muslims in different historical settings distinguished between legal and ethical marital obligations. The first chapter primarily focuses on 10th-century Maliki texts and zuhd (self-renunciation) literature from North Africa and Andalusia, the second on 11th-century Shafiʿi texts and falsafa (virtue ethics) literature from Baghdad, the third on 12th-century Hanafi texts and khidma (service) literature from Iran/Transoxania, and the fourth on 13th-century Hanbali texts from Damascus.
In the khidma literature Katz explores, housework's obligation is tied more to social hierarchy than to gender. Notably, both zuhd and khidma literatures un-gender housework to some extent: a man becomes more virtuous by serving himself through the former, a son becomes more virtuous by serving his mother through the latter. Katz writes that husbands’ obligation to provide servants is not explicit in the Qurʾan or hadith, but rather comes from some jurists’ interpretation that husbands’ duty to provide food also requires a servant to prepare it. The husband is responsible for ensuring the food preparation is done, whether by a servant, an appliance, an industry worker, himself, or a combination of these. This rationale categorizes housework based on form and purpose: if cooking and sewing are part of provision, but cleaning is not, who then would clean the house? A parallel and equally comprehensive inspection of husbands’ work could elucidate this issue further.
Katz covers a range of juristic views on the relationship between work and the two forms of marital payment—mahr (dower) and nafaqa (maintenance). In one (minority) view, mahr compensates for sexual availability and nafaqa for housework; in another, mahr compensates for sexual access and nafaqa for continued sexual availability; in the third, neither mahr nor nafaqa is interpreted through a transactional framework. The limitation of the first view is that the husband's uncontested obligation to pay nafaqa does not align with the wife's contested obligation to do housework. Regarding the second view, Katz's conclusion that through marital payments the husband leases the wife's sexual capacity (akin to a worker's relationship to an employer) complicates Kecia Ali's (2010) argument that the husband purchases the wife's sexual capacity and thereby creates a slavery-like relationship. Katz cites scholars who considered housework as compensable only when it produces marketable products or benefits the husband financially. But if work is compensable only if it creates products or financially benefits one spouse, sex cannot be compensable through mahr and nafaqa. Alternatively, some Hanbali scholars Katz quotes considered both breastfeeding and children's service to parents as compensable, which suggests that it is precisely their nonobligatory nature that makes some works compensable: wives’ housework, children's service, and breastfeeding are compensable because they are nonobligatory; parents’ care for children and husbands’ provision for the family are not compensable because they are obligatory. This logic, too, renders sexual availability uncompensable because it is obligatory, which challenges the interpretation of mahr and nafaqa as payments for sex, thereby affirming the third view.
Many scholars in Katz's study did not in fact consider housework as the wife's ethical obligation: they chided husbands who are ungrateful to wives, emphasized the indebtedness of husbands to wives who perform housework, encouraged wives to know their legal rights to compensation, lamented the colonial imposition of housework on women, and forbade husbands to force or even request wives for housework. Asking—as Katz does—whether they had covertly patriarchal intentions behind these overtly egalitarian views is similarly unproductive as questioning an employer's goodwill in paying a fair wage or men's goodwill in supporting women's rights. The hadiths Katz cites when raising this question tell us more about the Prophet and all his family members’ involvement in housework than their respective intentions behind doing so. Even if her hypothesis is true—that unlike wives, husbands did housework out of self-renunciation or a sense of justice, but rarely out of love—an imagined singular intention behind an act matters little when the act itself provides relief to the wife, especially considering how often the language of “love” is used to extract unpaid work from women.
Despite expressly aiming to examine texts only as representations of scholarly worldviews, the book frequently interprets them as reflective of social reality. Intending to evaluate the nature—rather than the extent—of juristic ambivalence toward housework notwithstanding, Katz also often questions majority consensus using a small number of jurists’ views, the sources on some of which are problematic, as for instance with Abu Saʿid ibn Abi al-Khayr (d. 1049) and Muhammad ibn Sahnun (d. 854). As questioning the fairness of a marriage wherein the wife's only obligation is sexual availability, while the husband must be sexually available, financially productive, and domestically laborious, is not exclusively Muslim or premodern, a few scholars struggling to accept housework as nonobligatory indicates not necessarily a normative framework separate from jurisprudence, but rather the tension generated by the legal imperative to protect those most vulnerable to exploitation through such obligations.
That fiqh is only one of several frameworks of Islamic normativity is Katz's central argument. The scholarly discourses she explores, however, point to a hierarchical rather than lateral relationship between law and ethics: instead of mutually constituting the foundation, law appears to set the foundation of what it means to be Muslim, and ethics delineates how to be a better Muslim, a difference akin to that between Islam, īmān (faith), and iḥsān (excellence) in the hadith of Gabriel. This logic is manifest in juristic opinions that bar a husband from annulling a marriage for the wife's abstinence from housework (a matter of ethics) but allow each spouse to annul a marriage for the other's infrequent sexual availability (a matter of law), which also establishes sexual availability as a mutual legal obligation. Hence, Katz's assertion that Islamic law is more generous to wives than is the ethical literature applies equally to husbands, because law bestows minimal obligations (consequently minimal rights) on both. Perhaps––contrary to Katz's suggestion––her two interlocutors, Talal Asad and Wael Hallaq, do not aim to depict a monolithic premodern Islam with no scholarly disagreement and no distinction between law and ethics, but instead they point to how the nature of that distinction was different in premodernity. Instead of belonging in two separate, competing domains, one formed the other's foundation.
Katz's aim to challenge the presumed notion of a monolithic premodern Islam despite diversity of opinions being a fundamental and uncontested feature of the Islamic tradition, and the inadequate presentation of scholarly views that housework is indeed obligatory for wives to fulfill her goal of unsettling majority consensus, are two setbacks of the otherwise valuable and rare contribution to Anglophone scholarship on the Islamic marital economy. That the book might raise more questions in the reader's mind than it answers makes it all the more generative for Islamicists as well as scholars of gender, ethics, law, labor, and power.
