ABSTRACT

Family is an under-researched topic in Islamic history. This chapter identifies some of the general problems of framing family within the mainstream of Islamic history. The components of family differ from culture to culture, and the terms that identify them may not be reproducible from one language to another. A main concern of Muslim law, adumbrated in the Qur'an, was the individual and his or her property rights not least those operating in marriage and divorces notably their responsibilities towards their creditors and kin, who were statutory heirs. Functionalist sociology remains the main approach to the study of family in the Islamic middle ages, increasingly enriched by case studies, but with only one voice, that of Roy Mottahdeh, raised against collective approaches and proposing instead, for what he terms the self-description of their social bonds by social groups in tenth and eleventh-century Iran and Iraq, that individuals and not kin groups were the agents of social reproduction.