Privacy in Eighteenth-century Aleppo: The Limits of Cultural Ideals

Abstract

On the night of May 26, 1762, several residents of the Syrian city of Aleppo entered a house in their neighborhood uninvited. The owners were not in, but several unveiled women sitting in male company were there to greet them. If the scene proved less compromising than the intruders expected, it did confirm their suspicion that the house was a meeting place for illicit relations. The following day they turned in the owners, a man and his mother, to the court and secured the qadi's consent to have them expelled from the neighborhood.