Women and Gender in Mamluk Society: An Overview

On the evening of Saturday, 5 Shawwāl 919 (4 December 1513), Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl, a Cairene Hanafi deputy qadi, left home for a night vigil at the Qarāfah cemetery in Cairo. 1 His wife, expecting her husband to be absent for the entire night, sent for her lover, a certain Nūr al-Dīn al-Mashālī, himself a Shafiʿi deputy judge. Unfortunately for the two, a neighbor gave notice to the husband, who immediately rode over and found the door locked. When he broke in he found his wife and al-Mashālī in bed, embracing each other under the blanket. According to the account of Ibn Iyās, the lovers tried to settle the matter quietly by filling the husband’s purse. Al-Mashālī offered the husband a thousand dinars to keep his mouth shut, while the wife offered all the household goods that belonged to her, i.e., her trousseau, in return for his discretion. But the angry husband was not tempted by gold or silver; he locked them both in the house and went over to the court of the military chamberlain to lodge a complaint. When brought before this military judge, al-Mashālī confessed to the charge of adultery, and the chamberlain ordered that al-Mashālī should be stripped, and had both of them beaten severely. The two were then led through the city, facing backwards on the backs of donkeys. Finally, they were fined 100 dinars each. But then came a bizarre twist to this story; as the woman claimed that she was penniless, the officers of the chamberlain, perhaps following standard procedure a bit too rigidly, ordered the husband to pay the fine for his wife’s adultery; when he refused, he was put under arrest. When this semi-comic sequence of events reached the ears of an infuriated Sultan Qānṣūh, he convened his council and blamed the qadis for appointing immoral deputies like al-Mashālī, and demanded that the adulterers be punished in the way prescribed by Islamic law, that is, by stoning. It was an unusual order; no stoning had taken place for many years, and apparently never during Qānṣūh’s long reign. 2 But, while the sultan, representing secular authority, was pushing