This book seeks to make a contribution to the growing fi eld of Mediterranean studies by investigating the history of women, gender, and the law from a transreligious perspective. This is a diffi cult and perhaps counterintuitive undertaking, for questions of women and gender have, since the Enlightenment, served to identify “fundamental” differences among Islamic, Jewish, and Christian communities, and to measure how much more “advanced” Western European societies were than their Middle Eastern counterparts.1 As anybody even remotely familiar with the head-scarf debates in Turkey, France, England, and Germany knows, tensions surrounding issues of women’s rights continue to be cultivated in political discourse.