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On Tuesday, February 7, 2023 at 12:00-1:00PM US EST via Zoom, Marion Katz (New York University) gave a talk on her recent publication Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics before Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2022). In this book, Katz addresses the widely held assumption that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do work, and offers a new account of wives’ domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics. She reconstructs a complex discussion among Sunni legal scholars of the ninth to fourteenth centuries and examines its wide-ranging implications. This book sheds new light on notions of family, labor, and gender personhood as well as the interplay between legal and ethical doctrines in Islamic thought. Dilyara Agisheva (Harvard Law School) moderated the talk. Watch the video today!