It is widely held today that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do housework. Wives’ purported exemption from domestic labor became a talking point among Muslims responding to Orientalist stereotypes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” by the late nineteenth century, and it has been a prominent motif in writings by Muslim feminists in the United States since the 1980s.

In Wives and Work, Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives’ domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics. She reconstructs a complex discussion among Sunni legal scholars of the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE and examines its wide-ranging implications. As early as the ninth century, the prevalent doctrine that wives had no legal duty to do housework stood in conflict with what most scholars understood to be morally and religiously right. Scholars’ efforts to resolve this tension ranged widely, from drawing a clear distinction between legal claims and ethical ideals to seeking a synthesis of the two. Katz positions legal discussion within a larger landscape of Islamic normative discourse, emphasizing how legal models diverge from, but can sometimes be informed by, philosophical ethics. Through the lens of wives’ domestic labor, this book sheds new light on notions of family, labor, and gendered personhood as well as the interplay between legal and ethical doctrines in Islamic thought.

"By providing intensive and wide coverage of this issue, the book provides a major investigative tool into the interaction between law and economic realities. It portrays the legal content less as a theoretical framework, and more as a realistic approach to the dichotomy that economics and law were confronting together when change occurred." - Reading Religion

"A valuable, frequently surprising book that will attract scholars of law and ethics broadly define as much as specialists in premodern Islamic legal history and philosophy. Highly Recommended." - Choice

"The entire work makes for excellent reading for graduate-level syllabi. Here too, due to the breadth, depth, and richly intersecting bodies of literature that Katz explores, the text will likely invite conversations." - Journal of Islamic Ethics

"This book is a solid scholarly contribution to Islamic studies and to anthropology of religion and law. It is also an excellent read for a general public interested in Islamic ethics." - Journal of Oriental and African Studies (JOAS)

"The book is a refreshing read and the author has done full justice to the topic." - The Muslim World Book Review

"[A] rigorous and impressive display of primary source material." - Medieval Encounters