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their own status as slaveholders cannot help but have influenced the jurists’ rulings. We can discern very little definitely about the ways that the
    women or slaves in male jurists’ lives might have affected their scholar- ship beyond a few tantalizing hints in their texts.

    Legal Norms and Social Practices
    There was a complex, multilayered, and bidirectional relationship be- tween the legal-discursive tradition and the social world. One must not “mistake medieval normative and legal texts for descriptive accounts of gender relations in medieval Islam.” 62 Texts may unwittingly attest to social practices through their repeated condemnations of specific activi- ties. For instance, a tirade by fourteenth-century Cairene scholar Ibn al-Hajj terming women’s public presence a cause of social disorder inad- vertently demonstrates women’s persistence in appearing in public spaces. 63 Historian Amira Sonbol suggests that “the actual lives women led caused reactionary clergymen to interpret laws more conservatively. The ‘looser’ the women, the stricter the interpretation.” 64 The norm of female seclusion was consistently subverted in practice.
    But one cannot simply assume that texts merely presented a foil for resistance or that practice directly opposed doctrine. Legal writings, cautiously utilized, can serve as evidence for social history. 65 The preva- lence of certain subjects in legal treatises sometimes reflects their ac- tual importance and at other times is wildly disproportionate to their presence in real life. The focus on the validity of certain conditions in marriage contracts—such as those denying the husband the right to take additional concurrent wives—suggests that this was something brides routinely sought to negotiate. On the other hand, eunuchs and intersexed individuals occasioned a great deal of legal reflection but cannot have constituted more than a tiny minority of any population. Telling the difference between the two is sometimes a matter of guess- work, and sometimes can be backed up by other evidence, such as no- tarial manuals and court archives. Fatwas that include case particulars are more revealing than treatises; notarial manuals, which have a close connection to practice, are perhaps more useful still. 66 In evaluating specific cases mentioned in legal compendia, again one must assess whether they present historical fact or hypothetical cases.
    My aim in this book is not to extract social history from prescrip- tive texts. I neither assess how closely these texts mirror real life nor speculate extensively about how actual behavior conformed to jurists’
    dictates. Rather, I try to explicate the jurists’ surprisingly coherent vi- sion of marriage and its gendered duties and, secondarily, explore the role of jurisprudential dispute in producing doctrinal development. Though the dominant ideology in the texts was contested in practice, understanding it remains beneficial. In fact, to the unknowable extent that the jurists’ ideals went unrealized, the logical exigencies of the legal system—the things the jurists felt compelled to insist on even though they could not be enforced—are more sharply revealed. This book focuses on the jurists’ conceptual worlds, using agreements and disagreements on marriage, divorce, and spousal rights to illuminate ideas about gender, ownership, and legal reasoning. How did legal ratio- nales develop the way they did? What were the jurisprudential reasons as well as social assumptions behind the jurists’ choices?
    Understanding these discursive patterns poses challenges for read- ers today. As already noted, their authors shared unarticulated presup- positions unthinkable to many modern readers. Slavery, which they took for granted, is the clearest example, and I have already explained why it is inseparable from ideas about marriage. Less immediately obvi- ous but perhaps even more significant are notions about property rights and