La Demanda

Money and property are key elements of an ethical marriage, since one of the main purposes of marrying is the “protection of property.” The ethicists see money as a po- tential source of tension between husband and wife, so they discuss its management in some detail in order to explain what rules men should establish for wives with respect to money. Ghazali, Tusi, and Davani create financial ethics that are sensitive to women’s needs, as well as their legal rights, maintain a husband’s position as the leader and financial maintainer of the household and all those living in it.

According to the law, a woman has a claim on the wealth of her husband in the form ofnafaqah or maintenance as a result of the “marital bargain, due in exchange for mak- ing herself available to him (tamkin).”98 _{Putting aside the contours of this contractual}

relationship, the ethical treatises recognize that there are all sorts of financial situations between husband and wife. This recognition reflects the division of wealth in property in pre-modern Muslim societies. Yossef Rapoport writes that in Mamluk Cairo, Dam- ascus, and Jerusalem, during a period that overlaps with dates of authorship of the treatises in this study, it was common for parents to spend copiously for a daughter to bring a sizable dowry and trousseau to her marriages, depending on her social class.99

98_{Ali, 65.}

99_{Yossef Rapoport, Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge} University Press, 2005), 13-15.

Items given to her would legally belong only to her but would be for household use, such as furniture, luxury utensils, cookware, cushions, bedding, and textiles. In elite families, parents would also give their daughters jewelry, silver, and on occasion cash, land, and domestic servants. The ethicists’ guidelines on money in marriage reflect the reality that women could be independently wealthy, could be wealthier than their husbands, or have family members financially involved with their husbands.

The ethicists admit that a woman’s independent wealth was an attractive quality in a wife.100 _{Marriages in the pre-modern period were certainly contracted on the basis}

of a wife’s worth, even though a husband was still legally responsible for her financial maintenance. He could perhaps expect to benefit from her wealth, though Tusi advises that one should not marry solely on the basis of wealth. By itself, this noble sentiment demonstrates self-control over the vice of greed. However, Tusi follows this advice with the reasoning that the wife’s money and property will cause her to desire domination and authority and to think of her husband as subservient. He says,

a woman’s wealth should not become the reason for desiring [her], for women’s wealth calls for their search for authority, despotism, search for service, and self-exaltation. So [even] when the husband controls the wife’s wealth, his wife considers his station as a servant and assistant, not giving him honor and respect. Unrestrained chaos is inevitable until corruption of affairs of the household and life takes place.101

Although greed is a problematic vice that stems from an excessive expression of the

quwwat-i shahwi, in this piece of advice, greed is not under ethical scrutiny. Rather, Tusi is interested in maintaining the marital hierarchy of the husband’s domination as the ethical status quo. They subordinate concern for ethical formation of the malenafs

to the need for marital hierarchy. For this reason, Davani and Tusi advise that one should not marry a mannanah, “a rich woman who obliges her husband with her own

100_{Ghazali, 311. Tusi, 216-217 and Davani 188-189.} 101_{Tusi, 216-217.}

wealth.”102

Related to wealth is lineage, which also can cause upset in the marital hierarchy. Davani warns that:

As lineage is the basis of pride, and since women are known to be at a deficiency of mind, for this reason, they reject following their husbands. In fact there are times that they see their husbands in the place of servants, they break the order reverse the status quo, and cause loss of money. Wealth and beauty are similar disasters.103

Tusi and Davani simply advise: do not to marry a woman particularly for her rank or money, and you will not have the problem of her making a servant of you. Proper order in the marriage involves the husband governing the wife, which is not possible if a wife is of higher financial and social rank because a woman, with her rational deficiency will not understand why she must serve her husband.

From the recommendations given to men in the texts about how to manage their household expenses, it seems that wives had significant access to their husbands’ money. In fact, as I mention above, Tusi and Davani recommend one find a wife who has knowl- edge about budgeting as she would be most useful to one’s estate and fulfill one of her main wifely obligations, the protection of property. Tusi’s very definition of a salih or proper and good wife,“is a man’s partner in property, his co-parcener in housekeep- ing and management of the household, and his deputy in his absence.”104 A wife is

responsible for running a husband’s estate in his absence and functions as a vizier to her husband’s sultanate. For Tusi and Davani, it is key that the husband give his wife a “a free hand in controlling the provisions of the household and hiring servants for important matters.”105 _{This can mean delegating tasks to the wife such as budget}

102_{Tusi, 231. Davani, 193.} 103_{Davani 188-189.} 104_{Tusi, 215.}

decisions, household expenses, and hiring and firing servants. Yet, the husband should still oversee her bookkeeping, as a bad wife is fraudulent with a husband’s wealth or asks for money without need.106 Taking a more spiritual approach, Ghazali likewise

warns against being tightfisted with one’s wife and family, reminding the readers that the Prophet stated that spending on one’s family is better than spending on defending the faith, freeing a slave, or charity.107 _{All three recommend discretion in spending,}

while Tusi and Davani prescribe secrecy about the husband’s total net worth, lest the wife use that information against him.108

According to Rapoport, it was common for urban women, including few from elite and scholarly families, in pre-modern Muslim societies to earn wages for spinning tex- tiles and sewing.109 In addition to any independent wealth from a dowry, these wages

probably allowed women to have a modest income at their own disposal, outside of the husband’s financial support. Rapport reports that many women participated in a “women’s economy” in professions servicing women such as midwives, hairdressers, matchmakers, bath and hospital attendants, and wet nurses.110 _{He argues that it also}

created a dynamic between husband and wife that threatened the patriarchal ideal of the Muslim household, in which women were transacting outside the home. Because the wife, children, servants, and slaves all constitute theahl (people) of the home, they serve as “one indivisible economic unit.”111 _{This means that just as servants and slaves}

do not earn wages, wives do not “earn” money from their husbands. They are given provisions and sums by the husband, who is the leader of the home. Rapoport cites

106_{Tusi 225.} 107_{Ghazali, 318.} 108_{Tusi 218. Davani 190.} 109_{Rapoport, 32.} 110_{Rapoport, 33.} 111_{Rapport, 52.}

Hanbali scholar, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, “equated the support of wives with the sup- port of slaves” on the basis that “absence of wages [for household services] shields the supposed mutual loyalty and love between a master and his slave from the disharmo- nious market economy. The same should hold true, ideally, for the relations between husband and wife.”112

Though Rapoport is discussing the effect that a wife’s contact with the external world would have on the marital relationship, we can extrapolate that financial trans- actions and money lending within the marital relationship probably also strained it. The ethicists do not discuss money lending between wives and husbands directly. How- ever, Tusi does mention that the exchange of money should take place on friendly terms: “A wife is like a friend in that [...she is] content with whatever the husband gives her and forgives whatever the husband keeps from her and does not give her and does not refuse [him] her own wealth.”113 _{Tusi makes it clear to his readers that it is ethical to}

take money from their wives; an ethical wife would not refuse. They support wives lending money and giving control of their land114 _{as ethical for women even though}

women were not legally required to share their wealth, and even though men ought not to marry richer women than themselves in order to maintain power.