Off the Straight Path: Illicit Sex, Law and Community in Ottoman Aleppo / Living Palestine. Family Survival, Resistance, and Mobility under Occupation

Off the Straight Path: Illicit Sex, Law and Community in Ottoman AleppoElyse Semerdjian’s Off the Straight Path: Illicit Sex, Law and Community in Ottoman Aleppo is a pioneering study of sexual crime and punishment during the Ottoman period based on records in the archives of the Islamic courts of Aleppo, Syria. Her work straddles several disciplines including women’s history, social history, and Islamic legal studies and makes significant contributions to each. Her subject of research is zina, which has multiple meanings including adultery, prostitution, procurement, sodomy, bestiality, and rape. Each of these are serious crimes under Islamic law that could result in draconian punishments including stoning. Living Palestine. Family Survival, Resistance, and Mobility under OccupationWhereas much academic work on Palestine focuses on the political, the central theme of this book, in contrast, is the social reproduction of Palestinian society. Zeroing in on the everyday lived experiences of Palestinians under occupation, it analyses the strategies of households and families, and their individual members, to improve their chances for survival and social mobility. This bookdoes not only highlight how families and households cope with ongoing processes of dispossession and repression, but also points to the limits of such endurance. More specifically, it underlines that certain households – the urban and rural poor and the refugees living in the camps, and certain family members – the young, the female, bear the brunt.