Katerina Nordin utilizes both specialized legal scholarship and vernacular Islamic literature to explore the nuanced debates surrounding veiling and restrictions on sexual freedom in Islam. The chapter discusses how many Muslim women adhere to these rulings by conscious choice, while also highlighting Islam’s encouragement of sexual pleasure for both genders within marriage and emphasizing that the extent of gender segregation remains negotiable.

Chapter 6 shows how female subordination was expressed and symbolised through head-covering, following St Paul’s injunction that ‘the woman ought to have power on her head because of the angels’ (1 Cor. 11: 10). While some theologians, including Calvin, sought to reinterpret the text figuratively rather than literally, the Reformation never completely lost sight of the idea of the church building as a sacred space hallowed by the presence of the angels. This idea was taken up in the early seventeenth century by Laudian divines who used it to promote the gesture of bowing to the altar. More surprisingly, it was also supported by a handful of non-Laudian divines, including Joseph Mede and Paul Micklethwaite. This complicates the standard picture of the early Stuart church as divided between Laudians and their opponents, and suggests that the Laudians were tapping into a more widespread concern about declining standards of reverence in public worship. It also challenges the view that the Reformation witnessed a desacralisation of sacred space, by showing how the belief in the sacredness of churches not only persisted long into the early modern period but rested specifically on the notion of supernatural presence.

Numerous unpublished Greek manuscripts contain the rituals of marriage as performed in diverse regions of the Byzantine world. This chapter both discusses the universal practices of weddings known across Christian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean and discerns unique traditions local to specific regions, like Byzantine Southern Italy or Palestine. The prayers of the marriage rite are analyzed, and attention is given to such gestures as crowning and veiling couples and to traditions previously unknown to Byzantinists, like the practice of breaking a glass at weddings, popularly understood today as a Jewish custom, as well as specific aspects of ritualized bridal costume and the roles of witnesses, or paranymphs.

The Middle East’s modernization drives initiated in the 1800s transferred power in stages from clerics to secular officials. Turkey’s secularization under Atatürk and İnönü is the boldest effort in this vein. Other ambitious campaigns occurred in Iran under the Pahlavis, Egypt under Nasser, and Tunisia under Bourguiba. These regimes might have been expected to facilitate exits from Islam, radically reinterpret the Quran, and broaden religious freedoms generally. In fact, they simply made it easy to ignore Islam. Their ideal was to have citizens disconnect their public selves from religion, and they felt justified in imposing their preferences on the masses. Indeed, they treated certain Islamic practices as archaic and drove them out of the public realm. Just as heterodox Muslims were once repressed as heretics or apostates, so now under secular leaders the pious were persecuted as obscurantists. In the process, modernizers constricted all discourses on Islam. Quashing dissent on religious policies, they effectively replaced one form of religious repression with another. Some secularists considered their illiberal policies transitional. Religiosity would decline with economic development, they believed, and worldviews would become secularized. But resistance from the pious led, instead, to a softening of secularist repression.

Using comparative and global perspectives, this chapter places in an historical context the bitter controversies which have erupted across Europe and the Middle East in recent years over women's veiling, and especially their wearing of the face-veil or niqab. It shows how the deeper issues contained within these controversies – secularism versus religious belief, modernism versus tradition, individual freedom versus social or family coercion, identity versus integration – are not new but are strikingly prefigured by earlier conflicts. The chapter focuses particularly on the state-sponsored anti-veiling campaigns which swept across wide swathes of the Muslim world in the interwar period of high modernism, especially in Turkey and the Balkans, Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, narratives of these campaigns revealing much about the ambitions of modernism, the triumphs of nationalism and state-building, and the struggles of class and gender.. In contrast to the accepted view, which sees female dress reform and other modernist gender policies as largely imposed by male-dominated authoritarian regimes and deeply unpopular among both men and women, the chapter emphasizes the agency of women themselves as they intervened forcefully in contributions to debates and by adopting different forms of clothing on their own initiative. Again in contrast to existing scholarship, the chapter observes that governments saw their repressive policies as primarily aimed at recalcitrant men and at defending women as they unveiled against a possibly violent male backlash. The chapter concludes by showung how, in the late twentieth-early twentieth century, veiling was reimagined, reinvented and widely readopted, becoming sometimes a hallmark of the modern Muslim woman, sometimes of the radical Islamist, once again demonstrating its profound liminality.

What can explain the rapid rise of Islamic politics in Turkey, a historically secular country? Many observers assume that the success and sustained popularity of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) reflects a religious resurgence in Turkey. But when this presumption is directly tested, evidence indicates that Turkish piety may actually be declining over time. This highlights the importance of statistical tests,leveraging variation across individuals, space, or time: they have the potential to overturn widely held assumptions and reopen key questions about the world around us. In finding no evidence of a religious resurgence in Turkey,an alternative explanation is needed. I introduce my trust-based theory of Islamic mobilization, explaining how references to Islam prime feelings of trust among those with a salient religious group identity, and how this group-based trust operates as an effective substitute for more generalized feelings of interpersonal trust, which are largely absent in Turkey and in many other Muslim countries. I contrast my trust-based theory with existing theories of Islamic-based politics and economics and preview the findings of the book, wherein I dismiss the existing explanations and offer support for mine.

Attitudes towards what we term ‘domestic violence’ are hard to locate in the ancient Greek sources, but they do emerge in a variety of literary and artistic genres which span several centuries. This chapter explores some of the key evidence and, utilising anthropological theory, asks what kind of violent treatment women received at the hands of male relations, and why. Issues of honour and shame surface as key causes, and the chapter explores the fragility of male and familial codes of conduct and the consequences of their infringement. It becomes clear that the sources on violence towards women are not so infrequently encountered as to suggest that violence did not occur often, but show that violence towards women was so matter of fact that it barely deserved mention.