This volume details the modernization of marriage and marital relations (as well as how gender impacted and was shaped as a result) in 19th and early 20th-century Egypt, when the contemporary Egyptian marriage system developed, a family ideology was constructed, and religious norms became the basis of family law. It describes the political, social, and demographic factors that contributed to changes in the marriage system, including the obsolescence of the harem system and decline of polygyny in Ottoman Egyptian ruling-class culture, and the decline of polygyny and joint household formation in the upper and middle classes; the new family ideology proposed by modernist intellectuals and the periodical press, which gave women the vocation of motherhood and household management, advocated companionate marriage, opposed polygyny, and discouraged divorce; the reorganization of the Sharia Courts and their procedures and the impact on the application of Muslim family law; the role of the unofficial code of Muslim family law composed by Muhammad Qadri Pasha in the invention of personal status law; and the history of the “house of obedience” that was a consequence of legal modernization. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)