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Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution (review)

practices of Aleppo’s courts were dynamic in spite of the fact that they did not change at all over the 359 years under study (xxiii) or when discussing the use of the oath in cases of rape (145). Semerdjian is well-versed in recent studies dealing with Ottoman law, society, and gender and is sometimes able to build on past research in constructing her arguments. Yet her work as a whole suffers from a historiographic thinness, particularly in her central argument that the courts were dynamic institutions and products of specific local histories. Instead of benefiting from the studies of Leslie Peirce, Beshara Doumani, and Iris Agmon (among others), which firmly place legal practice at the intersection of imperial, Islamic, and local discourses and argue for a dynamic and mutually constitutive relationship between court and local society, Semerdjian reduces this to a “comparative” approach between doctrine and practice that fails to connect them. Neither does she manage to integrate the history of the city and its political economy into her analysis of social classes and public opinion, and she leaves the reader wondering about the significance of her interesting discussion of the kanunnames and imperial fatwas that were, by her own admission, not irrelevant to the law as practiced in Aleppo. Semerdjian’s extensive research into 359 years of court records yields a rather thin trail of evidence: around 200 cases. This is not surprising, given the nature of the crimes she investigates; yet considering this frustrating archival poverty, it is all the more regrettable that she chooses not to make full use of the potential in some of her stories by providing a deeper analysis and some social history.