Doumani’s comparative study of the mutually constitutive encounters between property, kin, and gender in the Ottoman cities of Tripoli and Nablus from the early modern to the modern period (1660–1860) is a social history of the family (materially and discursively understood) as constituted by, and reflective of, the legal/spiritual practices and political economies of the two cities. His argument is focused on the family waqf (endowment) that was pervasively used by the propertied urban classes in Ottoman Syria and elsewhere in the period under investigation.
The importance of the family waqf lies in its being the only legal instrument for property devolution in Islam; as crucial, it was flexible, with “a built-in toolbox of options” allowing individuals to “custom-design … long-term property relations between kin, and between the self and God” (103). In addition to being both a “social act” and a “family charter,” the waqf was a “capacious institution”...