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strictures on social equality in marriage have been linked to Kufan cosmopolitanism. Still, whatever regional differences existed, common traits affected legal scholarship. Economic stratification, eth- nic hierarchy, and at least some degree of sex segregation were promi- nent features of the societies where these texts emerged.
    We must say a bit more about the gendered settings in which legal texts were produced as well as the general climate of ideas and social practices of the time. Prescriptive texts advocating strict sex segregation did not fully describe reality, but jurisprudence was in practice a pre- dominantly male enterprise. Women were not formally excluded from studying jurisprudence or attaining its highest ranks; some jurists even permitted, at least theoretically, women’s appointment to judgeships. Within scholarly families, females might receive an education in juris- prudence , and some of these women taught students. (They did not, though, partake of the ri h la, the journey in search of knowledge that was de rigueur for most scholars of the time.) A few later female scholars became famous muftis, and their guidance was routinely sought. How- ever, women are rarely cited as authorities for particular legal positions— Muhammad’s wife ' A ' isha is an exception—and none is recorded in these texts as the author of a work of jurisprudence. Women’s voices in these legal texts are muted, though not uniformly silent.
    Gendered patterns of segregation and female subordination not only marginalized women from the ranks of scholars but also shaped male jurists’ doctrines. Leila Ahmed has argued that legal norms for marriage were colored by the “easy access” elite men had to female slaves, which led to a blurring of “the distinction between concubine, woman for sexual use, and object.” 57 She links these shifts in “the ground of intersexual relationships” to the process whereby “it became the norm among the elites for men to own large harems of slave women.” 58 One must not discount the influence of the sexual commodification of en- slaved women on cultural production. Nonetheless, the practices of the courtly elite did not translate directly into law. First, harems were com- plex institutions, serving purposes other than the sexual gratification of rulers. Of the thousands of women in the early Abbasid caliph al- Mutawakkil’s harem (estimates range from 4,000 to 12,000), only a small fraction were likely concubines. 59 Most would have been domestic drudges and personal servants, not only of the concubines but also of administrators, women of the family, young children, and so forth. A second consideration is that jurists were not truly part of the courtly elite with fabulous wealth and “large harems.” Their experience of the sexual system was tempered both by their distance from the rock-star lifestyle of the caliph’s court and by their consistent attempts to inte- grate theory and practice, text and life.
    Slave ownership was not only for the filthy rich, though, and the jurists identified with slaveholders rather than with slaves. Some owned at least one enslaved concubine; both Shafi ' i and Ibn Hanbal died leav- ing concubines who had borne them children (umm walad s ). 60 One re- port declares that Malik ibn Anas “purchased three hundred sar a r i [con- cubines] and would spend one night a year with each of them.” 61 Even if, as is likely, this report exaggerates, it makes clear that concubinage was a normal part of the sociosexual patterns of life in this era, as was domestic servitude more generally. Shafi ' i—by no means a wealthy man—apparently had in his household two adolescent male slaves as well as an Andalusian wet nurse, who nursed the child born to his slave concubine. Stories about Malik refer to a black female slave who an- swered knocks at his gate. In addition to illustrating the widespread nature of slaveholding, these anecdotes help us remember that