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Abstract: In 1910 Khedive Abbas II felt it necessary to cover up a perfectly legal polygynous marriage, unlike his grandfather, whose fourteen consorts were public testimony to his grandeur and masculinity. What had changed in the interval was the spread of a new family ideology that identified the conjugal family as the basis of civilization and the site where the nation’s future leaders were nurtured. This family ideology valorized women’s education to enable them to fulfill their vocation as mother, household manager, and helpmate; it encouraged monogamy and it discouraged divorce. Its modernist proponents have been mis-identified as proto-feminists. The modernists hybridized those identifiably post-Enlightenment European ideas with pre-colonial Muslim norms of marital relations, the most important of which is the maintenance-obedience relationship, in which the wife owes the husband obedience and he owes her and their children maintenance. this talk will focus on the new family ideology. However, two additional processes contributed to the (re)invention of Egypt’s modern marriage system. The abandonment of polygyny and slave concubinage by the ruling khedival family in favor of monogamous marriage, the subsequent suppression of slave trafficking, and a rising age at marriage, were contingent factors abetting the new family ideology. The reorganization of the Sharia court system enhanced the authority of the courts in family affairs, and the codification of Muslim family law gave the state a greater managerial role in family life.

Bio: Kenneth M. Cuno researches, teaches, and writes about the history of the modern Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in history at UCLA in 1985, and taught at the American University in Cairo before coming to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. He is the author of Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt (2015), which was awarded the Albert Hourani Book Prize by the Middle East Studies Association. Other recent books include Race and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans, co-edited with Terence Walz (2010); and Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia, co-edited with Manisha Desai (2009). His recent articles include the chapter on nineteenth-century Egypt in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 5 (2010).