Law, medicine and society in nineteenth-century Egypt
Première série | n° 34 /// 1998
Droits d’Égypte : histoire et sociologie
Law, medicine and society in nineteenth-century Egypt
Khaled Fahmy
p. 17-52
قضية[عدل]
'Alî Afandî heard a muted sound, like that of a heavy body, crashing on the floor. He immediately searched for his eighty-year-old mother, 'Â'isha bint Mustafâ, who was living with him and with his wife, and who suffered bouts of fainting during which she would loose consciousness for fifteen minutes or so. He rushed to his mother's room, but could not find her ; then, looking through the window, he saw her lying dead on the ground next to the broken pottery trough that she used for her ablutions.
قضية أخرى[عدل]
case of an eighty-year-old man named Bayyûmî al-'Attarî of Shubrâ al-Khayma to the north of Cairo. On the morning of 20 February 1858, he marched off to the Cairo Police Headquartersin Azbakiyya to report on his wife. He took an axe and an earthenware jug with him, and when he arrived at the police station, he produced both the jug and the axe and claimed that his wife had filled his drinking jug with her menstrual blood in an attempt to poison him ; the iron axe, he added, was used by his own son the previous night to kill him.
40 Majlis al-ahkâm, Reg. S/7/10/1 [old no. 661], case no. 14, p. 4, on 10 dhû al-qi'da 1274/22 June 18 (...) 30Alarmed by these accusations, the police officer on duty immediately ordered a medical examination to be conducted on the claimant, and another examination to be done on the contents of the drinking jug. Bayyûmî was found healthy, although old and with weak eyesight. No signs of illness or bruises were detected on his body. More significantly, though, is that the liquid in the jug was not menstrual blood. Confronted by the medical evidence that contradicted his statement, Bayyûmî confessed that he had been lying and admitted that he had done so to get back at his wife (bi-qasd ighâzat zawjatihi). He, in turn, retracted his earlier testimony. He explained that the previous night he had fought with his wife, and like earlier fights, it was triggered by her continued refusal to have sex with him. It seems that on this night either he was particularly adamant about his marital rights, or she was equally adamant about denying him these rights, making fun of him by reminding him of his age in the presence of their children (they had two sons and a daughter).
قضية[عدل]
Hajj Ibrâhîm immediately summoned the local midwife (dâya), a seventy-year-old woman named 'Abda, who came quickly.
