>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. >> Joan Weeks: [Foreign language]. So, welcome to the Middle East-- African and Middle East Division reading room. On behalf of my colleagues and in particular Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of this division who couldn't be with us today, I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to everyone. I'm Joan Weeks. I'm head of the Near East Section, the sponsor of today's program. We are very pleased to present this program entitled Snapshots of Ottoman Women and it's in celebration of March at the Library of Congress which is Women's History Month. So, we look forward to featuring programs that highlight special events concerning women-- women's history. But before we start today's program and introduce our speaker, I'd like to give you just a brief overview of our division and the resources. And I've got an agenda today. All of my Turkish-speaking and reading people that have come to this program today, I want to invite you in here to use these collections, read the latest novels. When you go to travel to Turkey and you happen to be going anywhere near Bursa, wouldn't you like to have this wonderful book, before you do, all about Bursa? Look at all the fantastic pictures. Everything you would need to know and look at about Bursa. I'm going to set it over here for people to look at afterwards. What if you're going to Izmir? Well, here's everything that you would like to know statistically, architecturally about the buildings. There is everything about archeology, how about romance novels? Come on and read the latest ones. We've got newspaper, microfilm those. We've got all sorts of journals and they're just waiting for you to come in and use them. And one of my favorite new works is this, all the wonderful artisans in Istanbul, and there's all of these poems in Osmanli Turkcesi. And then on the other side, they're in modern Turkcesi. And how nice you can-- I'm sort of very slow at reading Ottoman Turkish. So, what you can do is look at the modern Turkish and then figure it out on the other side. I love this side by side thing. And I'd love to have you come in and use these works, and all you need to do is search in our catalog. You can get a reader card on the first floor and you can even request the books ahead of time. So, they're waiting for you in our reading room when you come in. And I hope you'll do that. Other things, we are a custodial division and we have three sections that serve the countries and collections for researchers around the world. We cover over 78 countries and over two dozen languages. So we're very concentrated. The Africa section includes all the countries of Sub-Sahara Africa. Hebraic Section covers Hebraic worldwide. And the Near East Section covers all of the Arab countries in Northern Africa, the Middle East, Turkey and all of Turkic Central Asia, Afghanistan, even the Muslims of Western China, Balkans. So, it's very, very extensive holdings. And I'd also like to invite you to try out our blog written by our curators and specialists. And I also would like to invite you to like our Facebook page, because then you're going to learn about all our future programs and really get connected to us in a great way. Also today, I invite your questions at the end, but just be aware that because we're webcasting this for future broadcast, you're kind of implicitly giving your permission to be videotaped in the program. So without further ado, I'd like to go ahead and introduce our speaker for today. Betul Basaran received her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2006. And now, she's the associate professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary's College in Maryland. She is a historian of the Islamic Middle East and her primary area of expertise, the social economic and legal history of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern era. At St. Mary's College, she teaches various courses in the cross-disciplinary areas of Asian studies, women, gender and sexuality studies, history and religious studies. She uses an integrated comprehensive approach in her classes with an emphasis on cultural-- cross-cultural encounters between the Muslim world, Europe and the Mediterranean. She is the author of "Selim III, Social Order and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century between Crisis and Order" and has published a number of book chapters on the artisans and populations of Ottoman Istanbul. She has also worked extensively in the Ottoman Archives and taught Ottoman language and paleontology at the University of Chicago and Georgetown University. Her latest project is on urban space and mobility with the focus on the surveillance of dangerous classes of the Ottoman and European cities, very fascinating. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Betul Basaran to the podium. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Betul Basaran: I'm really happy and excited to be here today. The Library of Congress for historian and a bookworm is a fascinating place. It's like a dream. So, to be here talking to an interested audience is amazing. And I'm also thrilled to see some old friends and new friends who are interested in what I have to say today. So, I want to say a few things about myself first in-- before I start talking about our topic today. So, I was born and raised in Turkey in a very, very secular family. And anything associated with the Ottoman Empire or the Sharia or Islam, these were not passwords in my household. My family, I would say had high expectations for me. I was sent to a private American school. I did international relations for my BA. So, I was going to become this great diplomat and bring peace to the Middle East, solve the crisis in the Middle East, all of that, probably working for a Western NGO or the European Union or the NATO or something like that. So when I told them I was going to go into a PhD in Ottoman history, they were not thrilled to say the least, especially when I became interested in the sort of workings of Sharia law and Muslim Women's agency, things of that sort, it didn't really make much sense to them. And the reason I bring that up today is because I really feel very strongly that because of that modern Turkish nationalist narrative, the official narrative, plus the orientalist European narrative, those two things combined have really had a pretty devastating impact on our understanding of the nuances and complexities of both Islamic and Ottoman history. So, part of what I do in my teaching and my research is try to really question that and ask the questions that I really wasn't encouraged to ask from a young age. So, I remember going to Istanbul for-- I grew up in Izmir on the western coast of Turkey, going to Istanbul for the first time to visit some of the Ottoman monuments, this is back when they didn't really have good translations in science and either in modern Turkish or in English. And I just couldn't read any of the Ottoman script on these amazing buildings and monuments and fountains and mosques. I had no idea. It was so bizarre. It was like a schizophrenic experience to go see these places where a hundred years ago people spoke or wrote in a different language and read that stuff and knew what it was. So as a teenager, I was intrigued but it wasn't until I went into graduate school that I really started asking the questions, especially about the way the rhetoric about modernization in Turkey and Turkey's secularization and modernization, the way it's been presented as a phenomenon that's been welcomed by all people of all classes and backgrounds as if there were no nuances or complexities. So to ask the question-- questions about, well, how did this impact other people? I know my family really benefited from these developments and I had a great education and I'm grateful for the legal privileges and the equal rights that I have under the law, but how did this impact other people, what are different ways of thinking about this history that happened in my 20s which I think is kind of sad, but better late than never, I guess. So, that's how I came into the study of things Ottoman. And so when I first read the works of Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean, I was really sad to see him conceptualize the Ottoman Empire as the antithesis of everything European and modern or as really anti-Europe is what he calls it, and wanted to do some research and gear my teaching toward how to study Mediterranean societies and the Ottoman Empire as one and the-- or as partners in this shared cultural political environment. So even though I would argue, it's fair to say that the Ottoman state, Ottoman society was certainly distinctive, I would argue that it wasn't exceptional either in its militarism, its brutality, its religious fervor, or its misogyny or patriarchy, right? So, there are ways in which people in this geography and especially women since we're talking about women shared a culture of patriarchy regardless of religious difference in all of these Abrahamic traditions. So, we have to think about Ottoman women's experience within that broader context and I'm going to try to do that as much as possible in the rather short time period that we have to the best of my ability. So, let's start with the Ottoman Empire. This is-- All right. So, there are some of you here who know a lot about the Ottoman Empire already. So if this is repetitive, I apologize. So, this is a map that shows the Ottoman Empire around the beginning of the 18th century at its sort of fullest borders. And as many of you know, the Ottoman Empire ended after World War I and the modern Turkish Republic replaced it or inherited that legacy, but that legacy is built on complete rejection of everything Islamic and everything Ottoman until fairly recently. So when we talk about Ottoman subjects, we're talking about all of these people in this geography even though my research focuses on Istanbul more specifically. We have to remember that this was a multi-religious, multi ethnic empire. So, we're not just talking about Muslim Ottomans, Muslim men and women, but we're talking about Christian, Jewish and Muslim men and women and we're talking about free people and enslaved people, right? There were also slaves in-- on this geography. So, I'm going to try to-- really my snapshots, this is an attempt to give you snapshots of some examples, certainly not in any way all inclusive or comprehensive. So, who are the Ottoman women I'm going to try to talk about. As I said, I'm not going to talk only about Muslim women. This is a picture from the 19th century and clearly stage one from like a postcard, but that shows a Jewish woman, a Bulgarian woman and a Muslim woman. The reason I start with this picture is to remind us that the daily lives and lifestyles of women until the modern era didn't really differ a great deal, right, in this geography. We tend to really create these binaries between Muslims and everyone else, but it's certainly historically is inaccurate. Here is an Armenian peasant woman from South Eastern Turkey. And I like that she's smoking a cigarette. So, I had to-- I don't know, she could do that. Here is how a Fazil Enderuni in the 18th century, the person who illustrated this manuscript, represented an Istanbul lady in the 18th century wearing this special type of shoes. So, that's one way, another way to think about Ottoman women. And here is a-- from the same work, a scene of women just chilling at this-- in this garden at the park and there are a lot of different things going on in this picture. So, I'll leave you with this for a while as I proceed. But as-- like I said, I'm going to give you some snapshots of-- from the shared world of Muslim and dhimmi or zimmi in Ottoman Turkish that is non-Muslim protected peoples of the book, Jewish and Christian women and then both free and slave women and their experiences in the courts. And since we're talking about courts, it's important to start with a few things about the legal system in the Ottoman Empire. Obviously, the Ottomans created an empire that was-- that had Islam as its primary religion. But as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire, they had multiple legal systems functioning in the empire that were to sort of different purposes. So, the part of the legal system that apply to Muslim subjects of the Empire came from-- or was based on the dual systems of the Sharia or Islamic-- collection of Islamic principles and also what's known as the Kanun, the sultanic secular laws and law codes that were passed based on the authority of monarchs. And these two sets of laws guided the legal system basically, but they were meant to apply only in theory to Muslim subjects of the empire. So, Christian and Jewish subjects of the empire were not subjected to the same laws. The Ottomans recognized these groups as separate nations, millet is the Turkish word used for it and they granted the religious leaders of these groups very detailed and specific administrative fiscal and legal powers. So, they had authority to adjudicate and hear cases in their own courts to regulate private and spiritual education, welfare, hospitals, burials, cemeteries, clergy, their own clergy, maintenance of their houses of worship, collection of taxes, but also family law, so matters of inheritance, marriage, divorce, custody plus any kind of sales, sale of property, guardianships, dowries, things of that nature. So for all of these matters, Jewish and Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire technically had to go to their own courts. And as you can imagine, the clergy also wanted to keep it that way because it was within their authority to oversee the proper functioning of those systems. So within that broader picture, let's talk a little bit about what kind of rights, legal rights women had. I'm going to talk about the Sharia courts mainly, Sharia and Kanun. But since we're going to talk-- well, I choose-- I chose to talk today mainly about family law, it's going to be mostly Sharia principles rather than secular law codes. So, what kinds of rights did women have? I would say that although gender inequality and male dominance clearly prevailed in Islamic family law and its application in the Ottoman context, especially through man's right to unilateral repudiation of marriage known as talaq which I'll talk about a little bit later, polygamy, concubinage for example. Despite these things, research on Ottoman family law clearly suggests especially since the '70s, but more so in the last two decades that Christian, Jewish and Muslim women all used the Ottoman courts-- the Sharia courts to their advantage especially for economic transactions. They bought and sold property. They inherited and passed on their wealth, established endowments, borrowed and lent money and [inaudible] or partners in businesses. So, this literature has really restored the agency of these women who had previously appeared if at all as with one scholar has called passive orientalist caricatures in the scholar literature. So, there has been great enthusiasm in using these court records to document women's agency. And some scholars have taken this to argue that-- to question the existence of patriarchy in the Ottoman Empire. I wouldn't go as far as to say that, but I would say that it's important to recognize that women had-- Muslim women had certainly privileges that distinguish them from their counterparts in most early European-- early modern European societies who liked many of the same rights, especially in two areas, in property and marriage. And this is because women had full legal rights as individuals which in certain fields were indistinguishable from males. So for example in the types of property they could inherit or in the management of their property. Some of you probably already know that there's a standard half share of inheritance business in inheritance law, but they regularly inherit it from both their own families and in their marriages. And their rights in managing that property were identical to male rights. So even though the law and its application and its interpretation clearly favored men over women, nevertheless women could seek justice in the courts based on these legal rights and seek justice. So just for comparison, if we compare this to the Married Women's Property Act, the various acts in 1870 in the United Kingdom and then in the mid 1800s in the United States, this is just as a point of reference to highlight the fact that legally, Muslim women, and in this case we're talking about Ottoman women, had these rights that were their inalienable rights for many, many centuries before European women got them in the 19th century. So, this is from New York. New York's Married Women's Property Act became a model for other states in that period. So, I really want to clarify that my point here is not to compare one kind of patriarchy over the other or to think about which one is better. But rather, it is to highlight the fact that patriarchy existed and I'm interested in how women used the courts to contest this patriarchal gender religious hierarchy in the Ottoman Empire. So, one scholar, Deniz Kandiyoti, has used the term patriarchal bargain for this. So, women were literally bargaining with the patriarchy to make it work for them, but still working within the system. All right. So then in my snapshots today, I decided to give you examples from three broad areas. One, some things that I talk about, the women's economic activism or financial activities in court briefly, then about family law, mainly marriage-- mainly divorce and remarriage, and also matters of public order and the business of expelling women from certain neighborhoods, so literally just small snapshots. And I also want to point out that as in other early modern cities at the-- in the 18th century, poverty was rampant in Ottoman Istanbul. So some of the women that we encounter in the courts, we can assume that they are middle class or have some access to the courts. There was a very highly developed culture of going to the court. Women knew about the courts. And there is this famous saying that, you know, men couldn't stop women from going to the court, going-- and going to the hammam, basically to the public bath, right? So, it was a legitimate thing to do to go to court. Our understanding is that court fees were not exorbitant. They were affordable. We also know that very-- upper middle class and elite families didn't typically go to courts. So, they try to resolve matters among themselves, not to being shame to the family. So, it was a last resort for them. But the types of women who regularly used the courts seem to be sort of middle class urban women with some exemptions of course. All right. So when we look at women's financial activities, we see again from these records the use of court records that Ottoman women were quite active in the urban economy of Istanbul as borrowers of money, as lenders of money, as property owners, buyers and sellers, founders of endowments [inaudible]. They were managers of businesses and they were landladies. Middle class women were very active in setting up these small charitable family foundations that typically statistically most often included residential units, fountains, hammams, public baths and rental shops. They-- And they usually set up their family members, husbands, but especially their children and frequently their daughters and their slaves, female slaves as their-- as the beneficiaries of these foundations, endowments, and managers of the endowments. And so, their wealth typically came from two sources. I-- As I mentioned a little while ago, part of it came from inheritance because women had inheritance rights. So, they inherit it from their own family members. And then another source of wealth for women was upon marriage, the dowry that they receive, that's part of their marriage contract. So, a lot of women who had sizeable wealth and by that, I don't mean necessarily huge amounts of wealth, but large enough to invest in something, took this money and invested it in. So even though their wealth came through passive means, if you will, so they weren't going out and making money, they received it through inheritance in marriage, they were active in investing this money. We also see that they-- in addition to the courts, see these various courts in Istanbul, they also used the Imperial Council and they petitioned directly to monarch for cases that weren't resolved within the usual court procedures. And so, they took their grievances to the monarch directly in this process of bargaining in order to manipulate the existing legal system to make it work better for them. But again, I want to sort of qualify this by saying that I would not take this as far as to suggest that this gave women complete control of their lives. So, this activism in this agency is very important, but we have to remember the broader context. So, I wouldn't go as far as saying that this activism in courts is a direct proof of women's control of their lives. It is a huge privilege compared to other women around-- at the same time. So, women who are aware of these advantages made it their regular business to go to the courts. And the courts were different than how we imagine the courts today and that the qadi courts, the Sharia courts of the Ottoman Empire worked also as a kind of public notary. So any kind of business contract you have, you would take it to the magistrate or the judge, the qadi to officiate, right, like I could enter a contract with the neighbor for a rental, something or some kind of arrangement. Without the qadi's seal, that wouldn't be an official paper. So, there are all kinds of things in these court records, not just criminal court records for example. So, they can tell us about-- a lot about the types of activities urban women were involved in. When we move on to family law, especially marriage, issues of marriage, divorce and remarriage, let's look at what kinds of rights the Sharia or Islamic principles-- and the Ottomans follow the Hanafi School of Law, for those of you who are knowledgeable of the different schools of law in the Islamic context. So, Hanafi Law and Ottoman application of the law specified that upon marriage contract, the woman should receive a dowry from her husband, which then became an inalienable part of her private property, legally and technically untouchable by any male relative including her husband once she had reached legal majority. So sometimes, marriages were arranged before women reached puberty, and they had the right to contest that arranged marriage once they reached puberty. And there are many cases in the court records where we see women come to court, their husbands have gone, they're either missing or they've gone-- they've joined a military campaign or they've gone on a business trip of some sort but they've been gone for a long time. And so we see women go to court in order to request the maintenance that they're due from their husbands. There is actually a daily maintenance that every woman is legally entitled to. And if the husband fails to pay that maintenance to her or provide that to her-- for her, she can go to the judge and say this is not happening and I need it. And in the cases when the husband is either unable to financially pay or is away and missing or for whatever reason he's unable to pay, the courts grant the woman the right to borrow that money on behalf of her husband. So she borrows money and her husband is legally required to pay it back. All right, so we see women do that a lot. There are a lot of records of those. But also upon divorce or abandonment, women are entitled to what's referred to as a delayed portion of the dower of the marital gift, if you will, that's hers. And so we see women go to court with their marriage contracts asking the judge for the differed portion of their dower upon divorce. So before I move on to some examples, I want to make a few additional points. So we see that in according to Sharia principles, consent to marriage is legally required. So the woman has the right to contest it if for some reason she's been-- either her marriage has been arranged before she was legal -- of legal age, which is puberty. Or for some reason she has changed her mind and they were-- even though men had easier access to divorce, women had legitimate reasons to ask for a divorce. And we'll talk about a few of those in a minute. So how many of you have heard of the unilateral divorce in the Islamic law, talaq? A few people. So, in classical Islamic Law, men-- Muslim men have the right to unilaterally divorce their wives without going to court or providing the reason, a legitimate reason for it. Women don't have the same right. They have to proof-- they bear the burden of proof. So they have to go in court and prove that they have a legitimate reason to ask for a divorce. So while a man can say I divorce you, and there's a famous triple formula, so if he says it three times, that's a divorce and he is not required to go register it in the courts. The only reason we know is because women go to court and say he divorced me and I need him to pay me either because of custody issues or because of supporting her and the children. So we only know through women who go to court to contest it, right. So I'm interested-- I'm more interested today in telling you about, you know, what happens or under what circumstances women could ask for a divorce and how the courts handle that, and again how women used the courts to make the system work to the best of their advantage, under difficult circumstances, obviously. So, a Muslim woman's opportunities for seeking divorce included first and foremost the stipulations in their marriage contract. So any marriage that has been recorded in the courts have to include a marriage contract. And oftentimes, women could restrict the conditions in their contract under which the husband could pronounce the unilateral divorce. So there are some marriage contracts where the husband gives up that right, for example, and it's written in the contract. Or oftentimes there were stipulations that said if he is missing or if he is gone for so many number of years, then that's a legitimate reason for a divorce. So disappearance, abandonment, lack of support. So if a husband is not sufficiently supporting his family, his wife-- this is really about the wife, not the family as a whole, children are not part of this picture that I am talking about currently. Mental instability, so madness is a specific category and there is a broad category of harm, right. So if a woman could prove in court that her husband is mentally or physically abusing her or causing her harm, that's a legitimate reason for a divorce. Of course how would you prove that? That's the tricky part but these are legal categories. Blasphemy is another valid ground for annulling the marriage. But a very common scenario in the court records is a story of missing husbands and deserted wives. Like, so what happens to these women when the husbands desert them for various reasons? So the courts were prepared to deal with this issue. Because when men disappeared, most women were left without any resources, right. They might have a small-- the lucky ones might have a small amount of money. They might have invested in something or collecting rent of some sort or maybe working in some capacity but most women relied on family resources for survival. Among divorce cases, the most common form of termination, or a divorce that was initiated by women, is what's called a woman's divorce or a female-initiated divorce that involved the woman's voluntary-- the woman giving up her right to the delayed portion of the dower that is by law owed to her, right. So if she can't prove any other legitimate reason for a divorce and the husband is not consenting, then she can give up that chunk of money that's owed her for support after divorce. So, in a way, she is buying her husband's marital rights from him in return for the divorce. So, again, scholars have written quite a lot about this. My colleague Matt [inaudible] who's at University of Maryland College Park here has written about this type of divorce and it's questionable to what extent this type of divorce was empowering to women. Because on the one hand, it shows that the woman could divorce her husband. And once he gives up that right, it's almost automatic divorce. He doesn't have to deal with anything, any of the messy parts of the divorce after that. But how many women could do that, we can assume that women who had the financial resources to support themselves could do that or had the networks, family networks, or community networks. But we can assume that a lot of women stayed in miserable marriages because they couldn't do that. So it's-- the consequences are complex. And when women did that, they also automatically lost the custody of their children, right. So there was a lot at stake. On the one hand, you have this right. But on the other hand, it was complicated. So now let's look at a couple of examples. We passed this. Oh, we're going the other way. Here. So, in this court case from Ankara, we have a woman who goes to court complaining that her-- the inhabitants of her neighborhood are preventing her from remarrying. And her husband allegedly passed away four years ago. She's been told by someone that he had died. And she wants to remarry which is a very common scenario. It was pretty much on her to-- for people to not marry, you know, Ottoman society. So everybody married and remarried for the most part. Very few people married only once from the records as far as we can tell. So he-- she's asking for the right to be divorced so she can remarry in the absence of her husband. And the court grants her wish. So she's divorced from her husband and she's free to remarry. And the neighborhood residents are told to leave her alone, basically. Now here is another case. Let's take a moment to read and see if anybody can tell me what is different between these two cases. They're very similar but also different. Yeah. So we have a Christian woman here. An Armenian. So what is she doing at the qadi court? Why is she at the Sharia court? Right? Well, she's supposed to go to her orthodox Christian courts, they're there. And the law is specifying that she should go to her own community. But it's actually really common to see non-Muslim women in the Sharia courts, which is intriguing and amazing. This is why we love history and this work is like detective work. So why would non-Muslim women go to the Islamic courts, right. So in this case, again, the court decides in favor of her. And this is sort of based on the Sharia and maybe some of the law codes. But technically speaking, there is this nice division between different religious communities, right. In fact, going to the Sharia courts were so common that in Istanbul the patriarchs in both the Greek Orthodox Armenian and Jewish communities periodically petitioned the Ottoman Palace and religious dignitaries to stop it from happening because they want to have control over their own communities so-- and they kept going to the Sharia courts. So, I mean some of the reasons are obvious because from what we know, and I have to say, I haven't ever done in the research in the courts-- court records of those communities. So this is from secondary literature. But Orthodox Christian law, when a marriage was annulled, the husband did not return to his wife the premarital donation or the drahoma, given by the prospective bride's family to the groom. And Jewish women had to get from their husbands a bill of divorce, again, that only the husband could issue. But by comparison Muslim women-- in the Islamic courts, women had some options. So there were more options in the Islamic courts. And so because of this, we see that non-Muslim women went to the courts to register their marriages so that they could go back when something happened and ask for a divorce in the court as well. So I really don't know about the applicability of this in other Islamic Sharia courts, but I know it happened regularly in the Ottoman Empire in places like Damascus, in Aleppo and Cairo. This is not just in Istanbul. But again, at this point, I want to say that my goal is not to make a statement about which type of law was more impressive or more patriarchal, whether Jewish or the Christian Law was more repressive than Islamic Law. But rather, my point is that these women shared a common culture, a common patriarchal culture which did not easily allow them to divorce or remarry, right, whatever religion they were. But the Islamic courts gave them some extra options. All right, another example of grounds for divorce is impotence. So the sexual incompetence of the husband is a legitimate ground for a divorce in Sharia law. Again, there is the issue of in the absence of medical-- modern medicine, like how do you prove that, what do you do, or how long do you wait? There are very clear instructions in Sharia principles that talk about a woman finding out on the first day or night of their marriage that the husband some kind of hideous deforming disease or is incapable of having an erection, or that something terribly goes wrong on that first day. So the woman has the right to go to court immediately to report that. And there are records of it in the courts. But more broadly, we also have evidence of, you know, women going to court and oftentimes the judge grants like a waiting period. Like he gives like a year or something and says like work on it, it's probably, I'm not sure but there is a period. And then within that period, if the marriage is not consummated, then the woman gets the divorce because there was a basic understanding of the basic rights, basic conditions or exigencies of civic life, right, that everybody was entitled to. And these categories refer to the servants of God in Ottoman Sharia law and it included non-Muslims, right. So everybody is entitled to life property progeny. So, if you're not consummating your marriage and that's a violation of your basic rights and the judge grants you a divorce. So at this point, in fact the-- this image that I used in a flyer is an interesting one. So this is a woman in court complaining about her husband. And she has some perhaps family members, perhaps neighbors, we don't know and complaining to the judge. We-- Maybe she also wants a divorce so she can remarry. We don't have that information. And-- But what's interesting about this is the judge is holding something and I don't think there are any minors in the room so I can say it. He's holding a dildo. The Ottoman word is [inaudible], right. So she's holding or he's holding-- So she has presented as evidence to the judge. As evidence of her husband's impotence. Or, this is-- again, this is not in the court records. This is a miniature painting that represents the goings about in the court. But I would say, hypothesize, it sort of represents in a satirical manner, perhaps male anxieties about women going to court and asking for a divorce or perhaps humiliating the husband. I have never seen a court record that actually talks about the [inaudible] as-- So I don't know if the artist was inspired by an actual record or not. But we know that women went to court to prove their husbands' impotence and asked for divorces. All right, any questions so far? Can I take questions a little or shall we wait, Joan? [Inaudible] OK. So let me try to get through. [Inaudible] OK. All right then we'll move on. So the next thing I want to talk about was conversion. So non-Muslim women went through the item in Sharia courts to make use of these legal privileges, but also many of them converted to Islam as a way of gaining even more privilege in this society. As you're reading this, Marc Baer in his study of the 17th century writes that between 1650 and 1700 in Istanbul, hundreds of free mostly enslaved Christian and Jewish women converted to Islam and not necessarily because of marriage, because they wanted to marry a Muslim but for complicated reasons. So for non-Muslim women converting to Islam offered an escape from what may be more unbearable or more patriarchal depending on the context situations in their own communities. And conversion also gave them the custody of their children. So if a non-Muslim woman went to court and converted, not only was she immediately divorced from her husband but she also immediately gained the custody of her children to raise them as Muslim children which was otherwise complicated. So there were certain privileges to conversion obviously. But again, what I want to highlight, I agree with my colleague Marc Baer, that this was a way for women to opt out of one type of patriarchal system into another one that in some ways gave them more options but nevertheless also sustained and recreated this patriarchy over and over again, right. Because they're opting into a system that in some ways better in this context but did not challenge the working of the patriarchal system. And then there were also slave women who converted. And I would say that in a-- in an Islamic empire, a multiethnic, multireligious Islamic empire, slave-- non-Muslim slaves were at the very bottom of the hierarchy, right. So a non-Muslim slave woman had the most to gain from conversion, right, because of certain things. So, one, when a non-Muslim slave converted, she could not any longer be or he-- I'm talking mainly about women, so I can say she-- she could not any longer be owned by a non-Muslim slave owner, right. So if I convert as a slave to Islam and I have a Jewish or a Christian owner, then the authorities have the right to come and take me from his position to make sure that I'm going to be owned by a Muslim family. So that would be-- And that tended to be the kind of thing that Muslim elites like to do, right. So to sort of bring into your household a newly-- a new convert into a Muslim household was almost understood as a good act of good faith, right. So that gave women an opportunity to go from maybe of a commoner to an elite Muslim household, right. But of course also, the best thing that could happen was for a woman, a slave woman who converted to Islam to marry her master and bear children for him. When a slave woman had children with free Muslim men, her children were born slate free. They were now born into slavery. And in many cases, the owners could free the woman immediately. But if they did not do that, when the owner died, the slave automatically became free, right, without any contestation. So-- And not only that, but she became an equal heir to his estate. So not only did her children inherit equal shares as children from other marriages, but she also inherited as an equal wife in that marriage. So we see a lot of such records in the courts, former slaves going to court to do paperwork for inheritance and division of certain shares of estates and so forth. Yeah, so here is one account that I wanted to put up here. I'm going to go quickly through this now. Here's an account of a record in the courts for a woman being freed after having children. The last type of thing I want to bring up is the issue of women-- another way that women we're very vulnerable living in neighborhoods, especially women who lived on their own. So this could be women who were widowed or divorced or for some other reason lived alone which would be rare. But Ottoman government and society in the absence of modern police institutions until the 19th century used community policing like community watches to police themselves as small communities. So it was everybody else's business to spy on everybody else basically. It was very functional in some ways which, you can imagine, it put women and people who were marginalized in a vulnerable position. So my own research for my own book research, I work with some of these records. I was interested in matters of public order and disorder in neighborhoods. And my research in the court records show that this was the most common type of complaint about public order in neighborhoods, that is, a group of residents in the neighborhood get together, they go to the qadi. They're usually the imam and religious leaders of the neighborhood are with them and they complain about a group of women or entire families. And basically the language used in the records is very sort of standardized probably not the language that the petitioners use themselves. But they found-- they claimed that people were unfit to live among them because of various criminal behavior or bad morals. They didn't mind their own business. They didn't live a righteous life. For women, the accusations were usually about being disruptive or dishonest. This is probably a cover up for not being virtuous. For improper dress, being verbally abusive, using offensive language, receiving unidentified men and women in their residences, disregarding multiple warning, so there was a warning system but disregarding these warnings, and making such deeds-- misdeeds a habit, so habitual behavior. And in all of these cases, and here is one example, the accused allegedly disrupted peace and order in the neighborhood so the residents did not want them in that neighborhood. And I have to stress here that many times in these records women also appear as petitioners. So women we can say were also the watchdogs of their sisters. So it wasn't just men spying on women or men trying to get women expelled. There were often a lot of women in the groups as well. And these groups were mixed. A lot of Ottoman neighborhoods were mixed. So Muslim and non-Muslim races would come together to ask for the expulsion of certain people. I think I had a number of examples but this is again a scene. It's entitled from the same work as the "Brothel at Night" but they could just as well be curious neighbors questioning the integrity of these women who really, if they were on their own, didn't really have a lot of ways socially acceptable ways to defend themselves. So in this picture, you can see there are some Janissaries who worked, were usually like the police. So the imam probably receives a complaint and he goes knocking on the door. But even in these cases where allegedly in this case Fatma Hatun was caught with them indecently, right. This is really sort of covered up language, right. That could be a cover up for an accusation for prostitution. And it was really stunning to see in the records that the accusations for prostitution directly are almost nonexistent. Instead, you see these bad morals and we don't want them here. So the question of what happens to these women comes up. There is no way of tracing them unless they come back to court to ask for something. So there are cases where-- I believe I have one here. Yeah, so in this case-- In this one, they say they leave immediately. In this one, three years has-- had past. So a group of residents went to court and got a warrant, if you will, an order for these women to be expelled from the neighborhood. And then three years later, they go back to court saying they're still here. We came to court three years ago, you said they would go. So there's-- my point here is that until modern nation states, the state itself had very little power over the implementation of communal matters. So in a way, as annoying as a spy might have been, local communities had a lot of autonomy compared to how our governments sort of know everything about us today and police us and control us. Well, in terms of implementation, it was up to the community to make sure that those people-- my time is up-- that those people left, right. So in most cases, we don't know where people went, where these women went. There is some research that shows that they just move-- went to the neighborhood, one neighborhood down. They didn't go very far, they weren't exiled or they weren't punished for their behavior. In fact, there's research on prostitution in the Ottoman Empire both from the Arab lands and in Turkish parts of the Empire show that increasingly they were being banished in this way. But the state wasn't even outlawing prostitution based on immorality, they just wanted to get this people out of the public's sight, if you will, right. So there's this Arabic term they use, tathir, right, to sort of cleanse the filth, but make it invisible rather than stopping the deed itself. So women just went to different neighborhoods. They were traveling from one place to another. And we really don't know enough to know the real implications of that for women. So I want to leave on-- So, you know, a good note for women's agency. There were also a lot of women like Serife Hatun in this case, who challenged the courts. You know, this-- she-- there was a similar accusation about her and people thought she had strangers in her dwellings. And then they came and that was not the case. So she went to court and said these people have shamed me publicly, so I want compensation for that and she got it, right. So she challenged it and got monetary compensation for it. And I want to end with some images of Ottoman women later 20th century. But as the Ottoman Empire was transitioning, again, my point really has been that this was a shared world for Muslim and non-Muslim women under the Ottoman Empire. The same women started founding, starting women's organizations in the 19th and 20th centuries. So this group, that included Muslim and non-Muslim women, founded this association. And you see there's a plane, a propeller in the background. They raised the money for this plane and they bought it and they flew it themselves. They've been asking for the permission to do it, nobody wanted to give them permission or train then. So they raised the money and did it anyway. And they distributed fliers over Istanbul to publicize their organization for women's rights. They founded this one of the famous journals, women's journals, again Muslim and non-Muslim women. And I'm going to leave you with this my Turkish suffragists, right, who campaigned for universal suffrage in Turkey. And they got in 1930 the rights for local elections and then 1934 is when Turkish women got universal suffrage. That's fairly early compared to the global trend. So these Ottoman women together achieved a lot things and I would argue that it's a mistake to see them as separate entities and communities in a binary way that we tend to do today when it comes to Muslims. Thank you very much for your patience I think now we can take questions. Thank you. [Applause]. >> Thank you so much for such an awesome-- >> A little over my time but I hope it's OK. >> I have about one or two questions. We are running a little short. We like to reopen the reading room to our researchers but does somebody have a question? [ Inaudible ] >> No, you represented yourself. And women were sometimes represented by male relatives or you could hire somebody like-- or you could designate, not hire, designate but you didn't have to spend thousands of dollars to get an attorney to represent you. No, it was face to face, direct. Yes, ma'am. [ Inaudible ] I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you and say I'm not really sure. I really-- I haven't studied the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire well enough to really give you an idea. But I know that in nomadic-- among nomadic groups, there was resistance to settle down and being taxed by the government because there were different rules about taxation if you weren't moving around. Maybe it was resistance to being a French citizen rather than being a part of the-- But are you saying they were not part of the Ottoman Jewish Millets when they were-- before the French came? [ Inaudible ] Out of it, I understand. [ Inaudible ] Very interesting. I'm sorry, I don't know either. Can we take one more? >> Just one more. [ Inaudible ] Yes, it was binding. [Inaudible] It does so the Ottoman Law did not require non-Muslims to go there. Non-Muslims would go to the Sharia court only if they had a conflict with a Muslim subject of the Empire about money or business or whatever. And neighbors fought a lot, so they went to the court all the time. But if a Muslim was not involved, they didn't-- they have no obligation to go to the Sharia court. But when they did, they went and turned around and told to go to their own court. So if they came on their own initiative, the court granted them the same rights they granted Muslim women. [Inaudible] So what the rejection was from the patriarchs we need to do something about this because our people are going to your courts instead of coming to us and they were losing power within their own communities. Thank you very much. [ Inaudible ] Thank you. [Applause] Thank you very much. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.