The Family in the Medieval Islamic World

Family is underresearched in the study of the medieval Islamic world. Among historians, it is an uncontroversial topic, except for ideologically driven arguments about the cultural influence of Christian women in Muslim households in Islamic Spain. The Muslim conquests must, however, have brought numerous different models of family and kinship into contact or conflict throughout the conquered territories; nevertheless, conceptualizations of family have remained undiversified, intuitive and naturalistic. A sociological approach to the role of families in creating urban elites of religious scholars has supported an influential theory of the latters' importance in Muslim public life, while the Jewish households documented in the Cairo Geniza have provided images of urban domesticity. There has been limited discussion of rural families, of types of families and kinship groups and of tribalism. Some family-related topics, such as marriage, children, slavery, gender, sexuality, or women in Islam, have been studied under separate labels, but not within a broader approach that connects family members' domestic roles with the family's public functions and with wider historical questions. In the medieval sources, family held an important place in symbolic thought and in the literary imagination, as well as in religious and historical writing, political theory, and dynastic propaganda. While most historians continue to discuss medieval families in Islamic lands as collectivities and social vehicles, the investigation of subjective attitudes to family and other group relationships, against the backdrop of the notions of selfhood and agency found in biographical and imaginative writings, is an emerging trend among literary scholars.