Abstract:

This article examines Ottoman women’s tricks used to escape from marriage and muftis’ attitudes toward their tricks based on the issues reflected in the fatwa collections. The purpose of the article is to describe the tricks Ottoman women used for dissolving marriage in the face of the strict divorce and separation rules of the Hanafī madhhab and to analyze them alongside the muftis’ approaches. In Ottoman family law, women in principle are not entitled to divorce. The means for obtaining a divorce through the court are limited and bounded by strict procedural rules. The issues reflected in the fatwa collections indicate that many women who were unhappy with their marriage and wanted to divorce resorted to certain tricks in the face of this restrictive legal policy such as annulment of marriage by apostasy, using iddah as a retroactive marriage impediment and claiming after the marriage to have been a minor when the marriage contract was made. These tricks, which in some cases require penal sanction and fall outside the procedures laid down by law for dissolving marriage, indicate the desperation Ottoman women felt toward obtaining a divorce. This article describes these tricks through the reality presented by the fatwas of the Ottoman muftis who served in Anatolia and Rumelia between the 16th and 18th centuries and interprets them in the light of Hanafī legal doctrine. Using fatwas based on real events as a data source, the article is a study of the history of law that sheds light on the tricks Ottoman women were employed in the face of legal politics that had made it practically impossible to obtain a divorce on their initiative.

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