Marriage and money and divorce

It is widely accepted that the high rates of divorce are a Western phenomenon solely related to modernity. However, the author of this book believes that this phenomenon was already known to Islamic society in the Middle Ages. He also sees that those high divorce rates challenged the ideal model of marriage in Islam. Yusuf Rapoport, in principle, refuted the prevailing assumptions about the inferior status of Muslim women in Islamic societies. But he also refuted the guardianship of men over women. He concluded that marriage in Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages had little in common with the ideal male model advocated by scholars and jurists. With women receiving the dowry and entering the workforce for wages, along with strict separation of property between spouses, divorce became easier and more straightforward, even a completely natural phenomenon, to the extent that wives sometimes initiated it before their husbands! This work examined intimate aspects of people's lives, extracting human emotions from the midst of documents and historical texts, and provided a truly engaging reading of the relationship between money, marriage, and divorce, as well as the relationship between family and authority in the Islamic society of the Middle Ages.