"In this interpretation, in other words, zina as rape led to a severe, corporal tazir punishment that bore very little relationship to hadd adjudifications. At the same time, however, it was not just zina as rape, but rape along with abduction-the movement of perpetrator and his victim across space-that merited this particularly formidable response. The crime, that is, was conceived of as one that struck not just at sexual morality, but also at emerging notions of public and private space. And indeed, a second moment at which corporal punishment continued to be invoked was one that also revolved around questions of space. In this situation, however, the issue at stake was the respectability of the woman involved in the case. As Pierce argues, [I]f the mufti gave the category muhaddere [respectable] a definition, imperial law endowed it with material consequences. According to the statute books issues by the sultans, penalties for illegal behavior might differ according to whether a woman was muhaddere or not ...[i]n other words, the non-muhaddere woman might suffer a severe flogging and a substantial fine, while the parallel punishment for the muhaddere woman was the public humiliation of her husband the imposition of a comparatively lesser fine. By translating muhaddere as “respectable,” Peirce provides the literal translation (veiled, modest, concealed) with a significant social and legal meaning. At the same time, however, by choosing the word “respectable” in particular, she likewise gets at nascent modern notions of, of course, “respectability,” of the spaces in which respectable women travel, of where exactly women of what type move.33 Along with this new, sliding scale of fines linked to social status linked to corporal punishment,34 therefore, we can also see by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an interest on the part of the Ottoman government in defining not just the contract and copulation as they relate to sexual crime, but the sexual, moral, marital, economic, and political status of the individuals involved in them-especially to the extent that this status was manifested in movement across space."
January 1, 1970