Australianama by Khatun Samia;

Author:Khatun, Samia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

THE BOOK OF MARRIAGE

Tuesday, 24 May 1904 was a bright moonlit night at Marree railhead in the northern deserts of South Australia.1 When Sher Khan, a 35-year-old camel driver from Kabul, alighted from the 8.40 p.m. train, he hid in the shadows waiting for Moosha Balooch.2 Three months earlier, camel owner Moosha Balooch had become engaged to Adelaide Neackmore Khan amidst much celebration.3 Since then, the news of Adelaide’s pending marriage had haunted Sher Khan at every turn. On that night in May, Moosha was on his way home from the Marree post office when he saw Sher Khan at the railway turnstile. Moosha held out his hand. Instead of shaking it, Sher Khan yelled, ‘I’ll kill you, I can’t leave you alive!’ and shot Adelaide’s fiancé five times.4 One of the bullets pierced Moosha’s chest.

In 1904, Moosha Balooch and Sher Khan were both working in the camel industry. At the time of the shooting in Marree, both claimed that they were engaged to 14-year-old Adelaide, the daughter of camel driver Surwah Khan and his white wife. Adelaide’s story has been recounted in many histories of Muslims in Australia; Christine Stevens’ history of the camel industry contains the lengthiest account. Writing in 1989, Stevens claimed that ‘Surwah Khan agreed to his fourteen-year-old daughter marrying Sher Khan and the brideprice was set at £150.’5 According to Stevens, Sher Khan had already ‘paid a deposit of £100’ when ‘Moosha offered Surwah Khan £200 for his daughter.’ When he received the higher offer, ‘The greedy father accepted the money’ and ‘word of deceit spread fast … until it reached Sher Khan.’ Today ‘brideprice’ narratives like these feature at the centre of many histories of Muslim women in Australia.6

In this chapter, I challenge the use of brideprice narratives to describe gender relations between Muslim men and women. ‘Brideprice’ is an anthropological category invented in British colonial texts about colonised people, and I propose that people of Muslim heritage and feminist scholars alike need alternative stories about gender relations to those produced for the purpose of buttressing Anglo imperial regimes. The transactions Australian historians have called ‘brideprice’ were actually described as ‘mahar’ payments on marriage contracts signed at camel camps. I trace the Arabic legal concept of mahar to the literary/juridical texts titled Kitab al-Nikah (The Book of Marriage, pl. Kutub al-Nikah)—the Arabic and Persian volumes of historical precedents about marriage that were once found in legal libraries across South Asia. The Muslim intellectual tradition of Kitab al-Nikah offers us a model for feminist history writing. By using its architecture, I construct a history of marriage explicitly for use by people of Muslim heritage to make sense of our lives today, spanning across the national, imperial and racial borders of the colonial present.

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