2.1 Spaces, Substances, and Objects

One of the Arabic terms for kinship is qarāba, literally meaning “proximity.” It speaks of the physical proximity among members of the kin group, indicating the spatial aspect of kinship ties.¹⁵ Thus, proximity and affinity should be understood in tandem, as kinship features that were in constant interplay. Proximity was often a feature of domestic residence. Domestic residences not only offered daily opportunities for kinship encounters, but also served to mark the boundaries of kinship affiliations, signaling not only those who are aqārib (relatives), but also the ajānib (those who are external; foreigners).

Modern scholarship highlights the significance of domestic experiences for the creation, formation, and extension of kinship ties.¹⁶ Co-residency, shared property, and a set of objects that were charged with meaning gave the household a sense of space, as well as a sense of self-identification and unity. They refer to the structuring role of the domicile through the mundane activities that took place in the house in an almost ritualistic manner, rendering the household a congregational setting in which kinship ties are imbued with meaning.¹⁷ The domicile can be therefore seen as a space that generates social commitment through its unique experiences.¹⁸

Furthermore, archeological evidence indicates that already in Late Antiquity, and to a greater extent in the early Islamic period, various parts of the Near East have witnessed a physical expansion of housing units.¹⁹ The trend went hand in hand with the introduction of economic activities into living quarters, rendering the household a space of economic activity.²⁰ Further causes for the expansion of households were marital arrangements in which the male descendants of the family either settled with their brides within their father’s domicile or in a residency adjacent to it. Although patrilocal norms may have not been ubiquitous, they were nonetheless common, creating patterns of a multi-generational habitation that resulted in co-residency housing settings.²¹

The physicality of the domicile involved various substances and objects that formed what Carsten describes as “the material stuff to which ideas about kinship are attached.”²² It is commonly thought that blood lineage was usually the most significant form of affiliation in the medieval Islamic world. This is expressed in Goitein’s statement that “the bonds of blood were stronger than the ties of marriage.”²³ This statement echoes the common English and German idiom, “blood is thicker than water” (Blut ist dicker als Wasser) that is so central in Schneider’s critique of past kinship studies in anthropology.²⁴ However, ties of obligation in the medieval Islamic world were also created by other substances, relating to private spaces. Relatively well-known are milk relationships created between two infants suckled by the same mother around the same time.²⁵ Avner Giladi has explored the complex relationship between milk, blood, and sperm in medical and Islamic legal texts.²⁶ Much less explored are the ties created by food and drink, often consumed in the private home or in the workshop.²⁷ For example, oaths in everyday speech refer to the obligation created by eating “bread and salt” together, sharing a cup (i.e. consuming alcohol) and even eating sweets. Significantly, these oaths often connect the obligations due to consumed substances to obligations of other forms of proximity such as neighborliness, growing up together and friendship.²⁸

Beyond these substances, domestic objects carried with them sentiments over time and space.²⁹ Furniture of various sorts, bed and sofa covers, rugs and carpets, drapes and curtains, lamps, as well as dining and serving dishes were often passed down the generations, or transferred from one household to another, sketching imaginary horizontal and vertical lines of kinship attachments and encounters.³⁰ Objects carrying ritualistic significance also moved between households as can be seen in a series of medieval Islamic discussions about the presences of crosses, icons, and lamps in the household.³¹ These objects constituted both the substances and markers of kinship. On the one hand they offered familiarity, intimacy, and belonging, and on the other hand they could facilitate cross-cultic experiences. The dangers of such unsupervised mixings did not escape the attention of Mamluk authorities who would initiate searches for non-Muslim cultic items in Muslim households.³²

Another common structure of Near Eastern residential arrangements was the dār; a multi-structure compound, at the center of which there were one or more courtyards.³³ Dārs included several apartments (bayts) and were often multistoried. Seen in the context of extended families, the expansive residence enhanced the communal nature of family life, in which kinship attachments were elaborated through co-residency. The process was facilitated by the functional and recreational activities that took place in the shared spaces of the dār, such as its roofless courtyards or large halls.³⁴ At the same time, the vibrant family life that took place within multi-structured and expansive dwellings stood in stark separation to the public space outside it. Shielding as they were from the external world, windowless walls and wood screens (mashrabiyya), marked the boundaries of the domicile and as such also the contours of kinship affiliations.³⁵ Yet despite such high measures of segregation, domestic structures also facilitated encounters between different kin groups. Marriage, for example, meant far more than the introduction of new members into a pre-existing household, as it also linked separate households through the marital union.³⁶ Dārs were often shared both in terms of possession and occupancy. Other owners and residents could be members of the extended family or, just as often, outsiders. Documentary material from Egypt shows Jews, Muslims, and Christians living together in the same dār. As many documents attest, the division in ownership was not paralleled with a built physical division (shāʾiʿ ghayr maqsūm is the common Arabic legal expression³⁷ ). In other words, members of different families, and even different confessions shared the same residential space. In such cases, the dār’s common courtyard provided a shared space that broke down the strict division between private and public.³⁸ The intimacy created by quotidian interaction in this third type of space led occasionally to the constitution of kinship ties that transcended family bonds and spread among neighbors of different lineage, occupation, and confession.³⁹

Social proximity between different kinship groups within shared spaces was further supported by the services of communal facilities, such as a common well, laundry area, and at times also a shared cooking area, all of which were located in a common courtyard.⁴⁰ The indispensability of these facilities explains the clustering of private houses throughout the rural parts of the Fayyum and the Galilee, as well as urban centers such as Jarash and Fusṭāṭ.⁴¹ Indeed, boundaries between households were often difficult to detect. This has been explained on the grounds of “a reflexive relationship between spatial structures and social structures, between space and culture, or between architecture and its inhabitants.”⁴² These features are discernable in Fusṭāṭ, for example, through a variety of residential features, including passages between domestic units, the absence of direct ownership over property in shared open spaces, and the absences of clear indications of separate residential layouts.⁴³

2.2 Kinship Encounters through Family Law

While substances, objects, and common space connect people physically, kinship is also created by ideas and speech acts. Law, for example, often regulates and creates kinship. Law can regulate who you can have sex with, who you can marry, what are the economic consequences of marriage, who you inherit from and who inherits you. The basic Islamic vision of confessional communities centered around divinely revealed law living side by side (with the Muslim community on top) facilitated a profound and multifaceted encounter between systems of family law. This short section offers two examples of this encounter: the development of family law in the East and West Syrian Churches under quite clear influence of Islamic law and the rather different case of developments in Jewish family law in the medieval Islamic world.⁴⁴

Centuries prior to the Islamic takeover, East Syrian ecclesiastics were grappling with the absence of an ecclesiastical civil law.⁴⁵ Their endeavors were prompted by a Sasanian social setting that posed a threat to the Christian communal fold by offering civil legal services. Similar concerns would come to dominate West Syrian ecclesiastical leaders as they too fell under the sovereignty of a non-Christian civil power following the Islamic takeover of Syria and Iraq.⁴⁶ From an ecclesiastical perspective, the availability of Islamic civil options in such matters as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and property and the accessibility of Islamic judicial institutions to the non-Muslim subjects of the Islamic empire, posed an existential threat.⁴⁷ Synodical recordings from the late eighth through the late tenth centuries reflect West Syrian ecclesiastical apprehensions of Christians who turned to non-ecclesiastical judicial institutions. To that end, a similar project to the one initiated by the East Syrian Church under Sasanian rule was undertaken by its West Syrian counterpart. Thus, ecclesiastical exhortations against extra confessional litigation were now augmented by the incorporation of civil regulations within West Syrian legal compendia.

East Syrian lawmakers, it has been argued, drew largely from Iraqi and Iranian legal traditions, of which Islamic jurisprudence constituted a principal element.⁴⁸ The most explicit expression of West Syrian adoption of Islamic law are select canons and texts throughout a collection of synodical acts and civil regulations from as early as apostolic times to as late as the acts of a synod held in 1153.⁴⁹ Thus, the compiler of the synodic collection notes in his introduction:

We begin to write the book that contains all the new canons of the later patriarchs […] and all the laws, judgments, sentences, and heritages and the rest [of the legal affairs] of the Greek kings (i.e., Roman emperors), as well as of all the judgments, laws, sentences, heritages, (regarding) liberation of slaves, and of all the properties and the rest [of the legal affairs] of the Arab rulers under whose sentences the believers act and whose laws they accept.⁵⁰

Lev Weitz has rightly observed that while there is uncertainty regarding the identity of the compiler of the collection and the date of its composition, the content of a few recensions of an inheritance treatise in this collection evince the influence of Islamic law.⁵¹

Centuries later, however, a more comprehensive adoption of Islamic legal principles in Syriac ecclesiastical codices can be discerned. Both the West Syrian prelate (maphrian) Gregorius Abū al-Faraj bar ʾEbroyo (Bar Hebraeus, d. 1286) and the East Syrian metropolitan of Nisibis and Armenia, ʿAbdʾišoʿ bar Brīkha (ʿAbdʾišoʿ of Nisibis, d. 1318), although on a more limited scale, incorporated Islamic family law in their legal treatises.⁵²

As noted above, the creation and elaboration of an ecclesiastical civil law has been understood in the context of Christian life under non-Christian rule. The objective of maintaining a Christian fold that would provide its members with services that exceeded spiritual and ritualistic needs was a principal marker of late antique communal organizations.⁵³ A case in point is the prospect of Christians contracting marriage through a non-ecclesiastical court, a procedure referred to in the legal compendium of the East Syrian metropolitan of Fars Išōʿbokt of Rēwardašīr (d. ca. end of the eighth century) as “mediation of the pagans” (ḥanpē).⁵⁴ One way to discourage Christians from pursuing such a procedure was to advise them that the church will not be able to oblige the spouses to keep their vows, since they did not marry through an ecclesiastically sanctioned ceremony.⁵⁵ Such a threat, whether meaningful enough is hard to say, speaks nonetheless not only of the legal alternatives Christians had, but also of an ecclesiastical agenda to curtail judicial choice.⁵⁶ This agenda did more than simply keep Christian within the fold, but it also put forward a new vision of the Christian household. By insisting upon an ecclesiastical jurisdiction in matters pertaining to family life church leaders were seeking a foothold within the intimate sphere of the domicile.⁵⁷ Thus, the very measures that were taken for the sake of communal confinement resulted in the introduction of inter-confessional contact and exchange.

Scholars have pointed to some specific issues in West Syrian family law in which Islamic legal influence can be detected. Weitz has noted that the ecclesiastical position regarding the betrothal of an orphaned bride echoes the Islamic principle that the bride requires an alternative guardian to give her in marriage and two male witnesses who will testify to her unequivocal consent.⁵⁸ The elaboration of the marital gift, the mahra, has also been seen as influenced by Islamic law, whereby by the late eighth–early ninth centuries, West Syrian mahra would display a close affinity to the Islamic mahr (or ṣadāq), as the gift was incumbent solely upon the groom.⁵⁹ Finally, as noted above, both West Syrian and East Syrian medieval legal traditions appear to have incorporated Islamic principles of inheritance law, once again, a development that may have resulted from advantages offered by the Islamic legal system to some Christian litigants.⁶⁰

On the face of it, the case of Jewish law in the medieval Islamic world seems to be different to the development of family law in the East and West Syrian churches. Like Christians, Jews turned to Muslim legal venues for a variety of reasons.⁶¹ There is even evidence of Jews conducting marriage and divorce in Muslim courts.⁶² However, Rabbinic Judaism entered the Islamic period with an existing rich legal tradition conveyed mostly in the Mishna and the Babylonian Talmud, though it is not clear whether Jews maintained regular Jewish courts in pre-Islamic Iraq.⁶³ This extensive tradition will undergo a long process of systemization, rationalization, codification, and popularization under the influence of Islamic law and Arabic adab in general. This tradition also had to be exported from its traditional centers in Babylonia to Jewish communities abroad through new genres like reponsa and legal monographs. But for our purpose here, it is clear that the rabbis were not in the same situation as the East and West Syrian church fathers. The Muslim authorities tasked Jewish leadership to handle matters of personal status, like marriage and divorce, and to uphold public morality.⁶⁴ Over time, it became clear that this was to be done, at least outwardly, mostly according to the Rabbinic legal tradition.⁶⁵

Modern scholars have argued that while commercial law must adapt to new realities, family law deals with an internal communal institution that is essential to communal reproduction and identity. Thus, family law is more conservative and resistant to external influence.⁶⁶ Scholars generally agree that Islamic law influenced Jewish family in a variety of issues. Yet, proving direct influence is often impossible and scholars debate the direction of influence, whether we are dealing with direct or covert influence, parallel developments responding to common social realities, or even a third source that influenced both systems.⁶⁷ It must also be remembered that influence can work in different ways and one legal system may inspire a change in another system, but a change that is different from the original inspiration, not unlike electromagnetic induction. Furthermore, while Jews often used common Arabic vocabulary to discuss matters of family law, shared vocabulary does not indicate influence, and indeed in several important matters the vocabulary is common but the meaning of the words differs significantly.⁶⁸ Yet, decades of research have revealed many specific topics in which Islamic law have influenced Jewish family law.⁶⁹ In other cases, we see a common legal practice, like the writing of very similar conditions in marriage contracts, without it being possible to disentangle who influenced whom.⁷⁰ It should be noted that so far scholars have focused almost exclusively on Jewish-Islamic legal interaction, with the possibility of a legal encounter between Jewish law with the various Christian churches under Islam usually not taken into account, though this appears to be changing.⁷¹ Furthermore, in recent years the focus of attention has been broadening beyond the works of jurists to look at legal practice both in terms of courts as well as deeds produced by legal scribes according to consumers’ demands.⁷² Thus, while the Rabbis did not lift whole chapters of family from Muslim works, as was done by their West Syrian church counterparts, there was a significant encounter in the realm of family law between Judaism and Islam.

Yet beyond the piecemeal figuring out of specific topics of encounters between specific legal systems, it is important not to lose sight of the profound common grounds in which Muslims, Christians and Jews approached marriage as an institution. Goitein suggested that “Jews must have regarded Islamic law as very much similar to their own.”⁷³ Weitz has recently claimed that East and West Syrian bishops constructed their new Syriac family law from institutions “common to essentially all ancient Middle Eastern Legal cultures.”⁷⁴ When we look at Jewish, Christian and Muslim marriage contracts, when they exists, we find a basic similarity.⁷⁵ Marriage payments often take on a similar vocabulary and form, with the dower split between an early marriage gift and a delayed one. During the marriage, the husband is obliged to maintain his wife in terms of food and dress and is entitled to exclusive sexual access. Finally, all three traditions negotiated the common tension between viewing marriage as holding a certain sanctity while also seeing it as a contractual undertaking that is often compared to a commercial transaction or partnership. To be sure, profound differences can be found between the various religious and legal traditions, but the common ground cannot be ignored and certainly served a central arena for kinship encounters.

3.1 A Spiritually Based Community

The Constitution of Medina is commonly treated in modern scholarship as the earliest legal contract that was issued by a Muslim political authority.⁷⁶ It establishes a community of believers that renders other forms of social attachments secondary. This objective aligns closely with similar ideals in the Qurʾān and thus seems historically authentic. The Constitution draws a clear boundary between the believers and those who reject Muhammad’s calling through an attempt to gradually substitute tribal solidarities for communal ones, and an assertive demand from the believers to offer exclusive submission to Allah and His Prophet.⁷⁷ Put differently, the Constitution of Medina sought to unite the Muslims around social principles that stemmed from their convictions rather than their ancestry. Descent and alliance loyalties were to be replaced by spiritual kinship.⁷⁸ The profession of faith, the shahāda, would therefore signal a dramatic moment in which the individual not only submitted to Allah, but also entered a social alliance that took precedence over any other form of social commitment, even that of the family.

The Qurʾānic demand of Muslims to prioritize Allah over their kin is perhaps the most explicit in the statement: “O believers, be you securers of justice, witnesses for God, even though it be against yourselves, or your parents and kinsmen” (Q. 4:135).⁷⁹ The potential obstacle posed by family members in the path of the believers is attested as well: “O believers, among your wives and children there is an enemy to you; so beware of them” (Q. 64:14).⁸⁰ In the Qurʾānic retelling of the flood, Noah’s son refuses to board the ark and eventually drowns. Accepting God’s judgement, Noah declares: “O my Lord, my son is of my family (min ahlī) and Thy Promise is surely the truth.” God answers: “Noah, he is not of thy family (laysa min ahlika).”⁸¹ Similar notions find resonance in stories about the first generation of Muslim, such as in the case of the grandson of the Arabian poet Imruʾ al-Qays (d. ca. 550), who is recorded as executing his apostate uncle during the wars of apostasy (ḥurūb al-ridda).⁸²

While spiritual kinship superseded older familial and tribal loyalties, a complication arose in regard to parental authority. Qurʾānic verses guide children to submit to the authority of their parents so long as they are not instructed to act in a manner that would violate Islamic principles.⁸³ In other words, the Qurʾānic equation of submission to Allah with submission to one’s parent’s (Q. 6:151) applied to non-Muslim parents as well, so long as such parents do not lead the child astray.⁸⁴ The ideal was further developed in Islamic traditions about the early believers, whereby they are depicted offering primary alliance to Islam at the expense of their sentiments towards their parents.⁸⁵ Older kinship notions are not dispensed with, but the new spiritual kinship takes precedence.

Another way to prioritize Muslim communal ties over those of kinship was to depict the former in terms of the latter. Accordingly, communal membership is depicted as a siblinghood, realized through divine providence and spiritual unity: “And hold you fast to God´s bond, together, and do not scatter; remember God´s blessing upon you when you were enemies, and He brought your hearts together, so that by His blessing you became brothers” (Q. 3:103); “The believers indeed are brothers; so set things right between your two brothers, and fear God; haply so you will find mercy” (Q. 49:10). Indeed, according to some verses, the new Islamic kinship was to replace the old one: “Thou shalt not find any people who believe in God and the Last Day who are loving to anyone who opposes God and His Messenger, not though they were their fathers, or their sons, or their brothers, or their clan” (Q. 58:22).The entry ticket into an Islamic communal kinship was acquired through faith rather than genealogy, rendering tribal, clan, and family solidarities inferior to those of the community.⁸⁶

In addition to a sense of siblinghood, it was also the notion of Muhammad’s wives as “Mothers of the Believers” (Q. 33:6) that served to instill an Islamic sense of communal belonging by means of spiritual kinship.⁸⁷ In this way, the delineation of communal affiliations in kinship terms had not only an exclusionary effect, but also an inclusionary one. In creating a communal system that was couched in spiritual conviction and a distinct orthopraxy, the umma was assigned a “super-tribal character” that could now be constantly expanded.⁸⁸ It was this character of the umma that was meant to facilitate the recruitment of new believers and their social immersion amongst fellow Muslims.⁸⁹ As Muslims believers were called upon to prioritize Allah and His community over their kin, their act did not only signal a substitution of social alliances, but also constituted an incentive for non-Muslim family members to follow them.

An illustration of how the conversion to Islam of a family member could lead others to convert is given in the Sīra with regard to the poet and chief of the Banū Daws, al-Ṭufayl b. ʿAmr al-Dawsī (d. 633).⁹⁰ It was owing to his resolve to embrace Islam and consequently severe ties with his pagan parents and wife that the latter chose to follow suit and convert as well, lest they be separated from him. The story about Ṭufayl is one of many similar stories of converts to Islam who were followed by their non-Muslim kinsfolk.⁹¹ It alerts us to the proselytizing utility of kinship ties.

While the Islamic spiritual kinship initially facilitated a reshuffling of tribal affiliations, with time it allowed for the integration of ethnic ones. It is in this context that we should read into the story about such figures as the Persian Companion Salmān al-Fārisī (d. ca. 656), whose immersion in the newly established community in Medina and the Prophet’s family was made possible not only thanks to a physical journey, but also thanks to a spiritual one.⁹² It was this spiritual kinship that would legitimize the absorption of non-Arabs within the umma during the second half of the seventh century and throughout the eighth and ultimately change the nature of Islam.⁹³

3.2 Intermarriage

Another obstacle in the vision of the family as the basic building block of the religious community is intermarriage. Intermarriage meant an interreligious encounter supplied by kinship ties. The phenomenon of marriage between members of different religious communities was not limited to a particular period in Islamic history. As a result, it has received considerable treatment in diverse genres of different religious backgrounds from as early as the first few Islamic centuries.⁹⁴ Initially intermarriage is attested in seventh-century Arabia between first-generation Muslims and local pagans, Jews, and Christians. Significantly, the prophet himself married two Jewish wives and had a Christian concubine, though all subsequently converted to Islam. Following the conquests, the choice of Muslim men to marry non-Muslim women is often attributed to a shortage of Muslim women in the newly acquired territories.⁹⁵ Later, as Muslims began to settle among local populations, gradually integrating into the local social fabric, the prospect of intermarriage was even greater.⁹⁶ Intermarriage raised issues of asymmetric power, intimacy, and communal belonging and continuity.

Islamic law allowed Muslim men to marry women from the “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb) (Q. 5:5). Muslim women, however, could neither marry nor remain in matrimony with non-Muslim men.⁹⁷ These rulings are reflected in numerous ecclesiastical canon laws and regulations that speak of Christian women who either through the patronage of their parents, or even on their own will, married outside the Christian fold.⁹⁸ In many cases, it seems that these women retained their Christian faith and even the membership in their Christian communities. In most cases, ecclesiastical leaders reacted with threats of excommunication and attempts to cut off ties between the female transgressors and their families. In some cases, however, there were also attempts to sustain these women and their offspring within the Christian community.

From an Islamic point of view, intermarriage challenged not only communal boundaries, but also the religious integrity of Muslim men who married non-Muslim women and their Muslim offspring. The intensification and elaboration of Islamic legal principles on intermarriage reflects the endeavors of Muslim jurists to regulate it.⁹⁹ At the same time, Eastern Christian ecclesiastical regulations and rabbinic legal positions show that intermarriage prompted concern among religious authorities across communal divides.¹⁰⁰ Together, Islamic, Christian, and Jewish legal sources offer us a history of ideas as well as some indication of the social cases that instigated them. The common thematic thread, however, disguises the notable gap in the amount of detail intermarriage receives in Islamic and non-Islamic legal sources. Whether due to the manner in which different literary genres of different religious provenances were preserved, or simply due to different levels of concern, the phenomenon is treated extensively in Islamic jurisprudence and rather sporadically among its non-Islamic counterparts. Initially addressed in the Qurʾān, and subsequently in the hadith and Islamic legal compendia, Islamic positions address the phenomenon by classifying lawful and unlawful non-Muslim spouses and regulating marital unions following the religious conversion of either spouse. Furthermore, these positions provide guidelines for the management of domestic life, the performance of religious rituals and the upbringing of children resulting from mixed unions.¹⁰¹ Unlike Islamic sources, however, contemporary ecclesiastical regulations are primarily focused on the permissibility of marriage outside the fold, along with some marginal reference to the manner in which the offspring of mixed unions was to be kept close to the church.¹⁰² From a rabbinic perspective, however, the main issues of concern were not so much the permissibility of intermarriage, but the consequences of mixed marriages following the apostasy of one of the spouses in matters pertaining to property, inheritance, and the Jewish identity of the offspring.¹⁰³ A unique legal aspect of Jewish legal deliberations concerned the legal ritual of levirate marriages, stipulating marriage between the brother and widow of a deceased childless man. Here again, instances of apostasy, either of the deceased or his brother, prompted considerable uncertainties.¹⁰⁴

The image we receive from legal deliberations, positions, and principles is of a multifaceted phenomenon, both in terms of the circumstances at its base and its ramifications. However, when read alongside other literary evidence the social realities that prompted legal regulation can be extracted. Thus, for example, names on Egyptian legal contracts that were made out a few centuries after the Muslim conquest speak of the mixed appellations of the children of Christian women who married Muslim men, bearing the latter’s patronym and a Christian first name.¹⁰⁵ These can be considered along Syrian ecclesiastical legal prohibitions that were issued around the same time in Syria and Iraq, referring to the dual affinities of Christian women to their Christian natal and Muslim patrilocal environments.¹⁰⁶ A rare, yet useful, rabbinic illustration of such liminality can be found in a ruling included in an eighth-century rabbinic compendium from Iraq. The ruling is concerned with the legality of the betrothal contract of a non-Jew (a Cuti, i.e., a Samaritan; used to refer to non-Jews), as well as that of the son of a Jewish apostate and a non- Jewish woman.¹⁰⁷

3.3 The Extension of Religiously Mixed Kinship Ties

The significance of religiously mixed marriages pertained not only to the lives of spouses and their offspring, but also to those who were tied to them through a kinship system that stretched beyond the household. As nodes on a network of kinship, individual households could be connected to each other through a common family head, matrimonial arrangements, or sibling ties.¹⁰⁸ On a more practical level, households were often adjunct to each other, shared courtyards, and their members partook in joint festivities, acted as business partners, and offered each other an invaluable social solidarity. In such households extended family members of distinct religious affiliations interacted with one another on a daily basis through diverse religious practices and objects.

It is in this context of extended kinship ties and shared kinship spaces that women played a particularly pivotal role as mediators of religious ideas and practices. Christian women married to Muslim men not only maintained ties with their Christian communities and families, but also played mediating roles across communal divides. These roles are suggested in contemporary Islamic normative literature, especially legal codes, that delineate the desired conduct of a non-Muslim woman in a Muslim-dominated household. For example, they prescribe purification to non-Muslim woman who participated in non-Muslim rituals prior to sexual intercourse with their Muslim husbands.¹⁰⁹ Similarly, they curtail their freedom to attend non-Muslim houses of worship, consume forbidden foods and drink, and introduce foreign rituals into the domicile.¹¹⁰ Such directives should be understood in the context of the domicile as a space of female devotional practices. Especially significant was a mother’s role in forming the character of her child during its formative years.¹¹¹ Accordingly, non-Muslim women who were married to Muslim husbands, mothered Muslim children, and interacted on a daily basis with a variety of other Muslim relatives, occupied a position within the household that allowed them to introduce ideas, practices, and objects that stemmed from their non-Muslim affiliation.¹¹² In consequence, there is some indication that Muslim authorities would initiate searches in religiously mixed homes that would lead to the confiscation of non-Muslim cultic objects that belonged to women.¹¹³

While non-Muslim women were in a position to introduce non-Muslim practices in Muslim-dominated households, an arrangement whereby the only form of legally sanctioned marriage was between Muslim men and non-Muslim women was bound to be advantageous from the standpoint of Islamic proselytizing agendas. As noted above, mixed matrimonies in seventh-century Arabia and during the first decades of the Islamic conquest outside it would often be followed by the conversion to Islam of the non-Muslim spouse.¹¹⁴ Although it is difficult to corroborate the historicity of the reports on such occurrences, they suggest that scenarios of conversion to Islam following marriage were not unthinkable. Other instances speak of a similar sequence in the context of mixed marriages following the conversion to Islam of one of the spouses. The proselytizing effect under such circumstances was both vis-à-vis the non-Muslim spouse and the couple’s offspring. Sporadic reports of uncertainties or debates regarding the religious identity of children whose parents converted to Islam were most likely the exception to the general rule whereby the conversion of one of the parents would render the children Muslim by default.¹¹⁵

While it is commonly held that men were more inclined to convert than women, a closer examination of the extant sources suggests that conversion to Islam of non-Muslim women who were married to non-Muslim men was a real possibility.¹¹⁶ Next to early traditions mentioning women who converted to Islam at the time of the Prophet and consequently abandoned their families, we also hear about others who remained living with their pagan families.¹¹⁷ Such traditions were often included in Islamic legal discussions pertaining to the question of women converts to Islam who were married to non-Muslim husbands. These should be read in conjunction with rabbinic deliberations regarding the property and legal status of Jewish female apostates who remained in matrimony with their Jewish husbands despite their conversion.¹¹⁸ Furthermore, there is also some indication suggesting that women not only converted to Islam, but also encouraged their husbands to follow suit.¹¹⁹ The proselytizing effect of marriage is also attested in ecclesiastical regulations of the early and medieval Islamic periods that license Christian men to take non-Christian wives on the condition that these men would bring about their wives’ conversion to Christianity. The early Pauline anticipation that either one of the believing spouses will sanctify the non-believing spouse (1 Corinthians 7:14), was now applied to non-Christian women only.¹²⁰

3.4 The Enduring Ties of Converts to Islam with Their Non-Muslim Kinsfolk

We have seen that religiously mixed households came into being due to both intermarriage and conversion to Islam. In addition to the kinship encounter of mixed households, another encounter can be seen in the ties converts to Islam retained with family members who still adhered to the converts’ former religion, including parents, siblings, and children. These resulted in the formulation of legal principles and regulations, on both sides of the religious divide. Thus, for example, ʿUmar I (r. 12–22/634–44) is alleged to have prohibited those members of the Mesopotamian Arab tribe of the Banū Taghlib who chose to remain Christian and were married to Muslims from raising their children as Christians.¹²¹ A similar concern over the potential negative impact of a parent in the context of conversion of Islam was invoked by al-Shāfiʿī:

We prefer that a man does not marry a woman from the Abode of War, out of fear that his child will be abducted. And it is disliked that he marries her even if she was a Muslim among the people of the Abode of War, out of fear for his child that they might snatch him or tempt him (yastariqūhu aw yaftinūhu).¹²²

Although the mother was Muslim, her anticipated ties with non-Muslim family members posed a threat to her child’s Islamic identity.

Religiously mixed family ties are evident in a host of legal deliberations referring to Muslim fathers of Christian daughters,¹²³ women converts to Islam and their non-Muslim children,¹²⁴ a son who converted to Islam while his mother was Christian,¹²⁵ and non-Muslim children whose parents converted to Islam.¹²⁶ Although the latter case suggests that some children may have converted to Islam prior to adulthood, it seems safe to argue that such a step was bound to be taken at a later stage in a person’s life.¹²⁷ References to differences of religion between parents and children are often made with regard to questions of inheritance. Jurists of diverse religious affiliations appear to have been preoccupied with the right of Muslim descendants to inherit their non-Muslim parents, and at times vice versa as well.¹²⁸ Beyond inferences from normative legal texts, the documents of the Cairo Geniza provide extensive evidence of the enduring ties between Jewish converts to Islam with their Jewish relatives.¹²⁹

The implications of such interreligious ties were wide. While religiously mixed households were usually limited to the immediate family members, the ties between converts and their former relatives extended across households and generations. These ties were also formulated in a variety of daily occasions, through economic partnerships, social solidarity, and in shared spaces. The expansive influence of such ties explains why they were a cause of normative uncertainties. Thus, for example, an Iraqi eighth-century rabbinic authority was asked if it was appropriate for Jews to offer a consolation meal to their bereaved apostate relatives.¹³⁰ Around the same time, there are good indications that Muslims and Christians were similarly preoccupied with dilemmas surrounding the death of infidel relatives.¹³¹

The endurance of ties between converts to Islam and their non-Muslim relatives was considered a threat to the coherence of communal boundaries, the integrity of religious identities, and, from the perspective of non-Muslim authorities, a hurdle to their efforts to curtail apostasy. At the same time, it also posed a proselytizing opportunity from the perspective of Muslim authorities and a way for drawing apostates back to the fold from the standpoint of their former non-Muslim communities. Medieval narratives about the first generations of Muslim converts served to glorify not only the achievements of those who ventured against the will of their kinsfolk, but also succeeded in drawing them to follow suit. Notable examples can be seen in the reports about the south-Arabian tribal leader al-Ṭufayl al-Dawsī whose conversion to Islam was followed by that of his parents and wife;¹³² the conversion of ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb following his sister;¹³³ and the conversion of Abū al-ʿĀṣ following that of the Prophet’s daughter Zaynab.¹³⁴ At the same time, Islamic legal principles and traditions, read alongside a host of geonic positions and ecclesiastical regulations and canon laws, speak of the conversion of Jews and Christian to Islam and their subsequent reversion to their former religions. We may assume that the enduring ties of these apostates with their former communities, whether on account of kinship sentiments and formal legal arrangements, paved the way for their reversion.¹³⁵

3.5 Slavery and Kinship Encounters

Slavery occasions another form of kinship encounter. Anthropologists debate the relationship between kinship and slavery. Miers and Kopytoff have argued for a basic continuum from slavery to kinship, noting that the dependency of children and women can be akin to the dependency of slaves and that slaves can be brought into the kin group.¹³⁶ Meillassoux argued strongly against this position, claiming that slavery is “antinomic” to kinship and that “the slave is above all […] the alien par excellence, if not the alien in an absolute sense.”¹³⁷ This debate is based on radically different conceptions of what is both slavery and kinship. As today we are aware of the almost mind-boggling diversity in both historical forms of slavery as well as forms of kinship, it seems that posing them as opposites is untenable. Slavery and kinship may not lay on a continuum, but they certainly can intersect at various points and slavery is a useful lens for kinship encounters. Discussing the intersections of slavery and kinship is also a useful way of resisting the tendency to view kinship as a benign and positive institution.¹³⁸

The diverse forms slavery can take are more than apparent in the medieval Islamic world.¹³⁹ Muhammad’s campaigns, and subsequently the Islamic conquests, brought about massive waves of enslavement and movement of enslaved persons across the Middle East. Even after the shock of the conquests was over, slaves were still imported to the region, mostly from the edges of Islamdom: Nubia, Southern and Eastern Europe, the Indian Ocean, and Central Asia. In the subsequent centuries several distinct types of enslavement developed, yet scholarly study of them remains very uneven. Probably most attention has been given to soldiers of slave origin and the mamlūks due to their central political role and the way they reshaped the relationship between political rule and religion.¹⁴⁰ Another scholarly focus has been non-Arabs who converted to Islam to become the mawālī of Muslim Arabs, an institution that had historical connections to slavery. These mawālī not only played a critical role in the political sphere (for example in the Abbasid revolution), but it is impossible to understand the efflorescence of literature, science, and law under the Abbasid without them.¹⁴¹ In recent years, growing attention has been given to the role of slaves in Muslim rulers’ courts, whether in the form of male eunuchs, enslaved female singers, or concubines.¹⁴² Such slaves are well attested in literary sources, but probably formed a narrow and small group. All these types of slavery are predominantly urban, yet Islamic history also provide the enigmatic case of the Zanj, East African slaves employed in sugar cane production and clearing nitrates from the topsoil of the marshes in southern Iraq who revolted against the Abbasids in 869–883.¹⁴³

Enslavement occasioned a loss of social identity and the creation of a relation with the master.¹⁴⁴ This asymmetric relationship, with its legal, monetary, religious, social, and emotional aspects, can often be considered as kinship as it entailed a “mutuality of being” between people who are significant to one another’s existence, to slightly tweak Sahlins’s famous reformulation of kinship. The clearest example is when enslaved people were married or used for sex.¹⁴⁵ This is perhaps the best evidence that slaves were not the absolute aliens envisioned by Meillassoux, as noted above. According to Islamic Law, when an enslaved concubine gives birth to a child of her master, she becomes an umm walad. This means she is forbidden from being sold and becomes free upon the master’s death. The child is considered a legitimate offspring of the master.¹⁴⁶ In the hadith that established the institution of umm walad, Muhammad recognized the paternity based on the legal ownership of the marital bed over biological paternity, thus resolving conflicting conceptions of kinship.¹⁴⁷ As noted above, since many enslaved women were non-Muslims and came from diverse ethnic backgrounds, the umm walad and her child formed a key locus of kinship encounter.

Another type of kinship tie was the bond of loyalty and identity in military slavery formed between the master and the enslaved and among themselves.¹⁴⁸ According to Islamic law, the special bond with the master is retained even after manumission. This formed a central role in the first centuries of Islam when the conversion of non-Arabs to Islam required a Muslim Arab “sponsor” to the conversion. These non-Arabs, who formed the aforementioned mawālī, received the tribal identity of their Arabian sponsor. Even from these limited examples it can be seen how the relationship between master and enslaved occasioned kinship encounters across the axes of gender, class, geography, race and legal institutions such as marriage and property. Beyond these various kinship ties and encounters occasioned by actual enslaved people, there was also a conceptual encounter. Kecia Ali showed how Muslim legal scholars developed their conception of Islamic marriage by thinking through slavery. In other words, slavery served as a conceptual model through which ideas about marriage were formed and developed.¹⁴⁹

The most common type of slavery in the medieval Islamic world was domestic slavery. Yet this type of slavery is the least studied, undoubtedly because of the lack of sources for the quotidian interactions within urban and rural households.¹⁵⁰ It is here that the documents of the Cairo Geniza provide a precious opportunity to examine the kinship encounters possible in these domestic settings.¹⁵¹ Wills and deathbed declarations of Jews often mention enslaved people, either taking care to manumit them or requesting that they be looked after. In one case, a Jewish woman declared that “my slave woman Munā has attended graciously to me during this and previous illness in ways that my mother and sister have not done … [she] shall not be sold, bought or transferred.”¹⁵² Another wealthy woman, probably childless, manumitted her two virgin enslaved girls and bequeathed to them real estate “on the condition that the slave girls profess the Jewish faith.”¹⁵³ As opposed to Islamic law, Jewish law does not recognize a remaining relationship between a former master and his freed slaves. However, this did not prevent a Jewish man to claim that the inheritance of the woman his father manumitted ought to go to him, despite her bequeathing her possession to two other women.¹⁵⁴ A complex legal query to Abraham Maimonides (d. 1237) reports how an enslaved man was transferred from his original female owner to another person who then released him. During a certain crisis, probably the great famine of 1201/2, the original female owner asked her former slave for help and he maintained her in the considerable sum of 4 dinars.¹⁵⁵ Such examples are used by Craig Perry to argue that “enslaved people” played a role “analogous to kin” both during their enslavement and after their manumission.¹⁵⁶ Once manumitted, Jewish law considers slaves as full Jews. Moshe Yagur had examined in depth the integration of freed men and women of diverse religious and ethnic background into Egyptian Jewish communities, often conceived as being strictly endogamous. That fact these foreign enslaved people resided within Jewish households and were later integrated into the community makes these encounters particularly fascinating.¹⁵⁷

Rabbinic responsa and Geniza documents also attest to the widespread reality of Jewish men having sex with the enslaved women in their possession.¹⁵⁸ While Islamic law allows a male master sexual use of his enslaved women, Jewish law strictly forbids it. Jewish communal attempts to crack down on this practice were often unsuccessful and occasionally led men to take off with the enslaved females and abandoned their wives and families. Scholars have usually adopted the communal perspective and framed this rather widespread practice as the result of immoral men and the weak means of communal coercion. However, regardless of our possible moral judgment, it is useful to consider other ways of framing this phenomenon. Craig Perry uses these cases to explore the nature of masculinity among medieval Jews and the possible avenues for enslaved female agency.¹⁵⁹ Even though they are depicted negatively in the sources, it is clear these unions were meaningful to these men and women. We are told that one man lavished his unlawful partner with “fine garments the likes of which his wife had never worn.”¹⁶⁰ Another man is reported to spend all his time with his unlawful partner (in his sister’s house, no less).¹⁶¹ A Christian enslaved woman was willing to lie to a Muslim Judge that she is “a Jew, a daughter of a Jew” and refused the suggestion to convert to Islam so she could go on living with her Jewish master who was reportedly sleeping with her.¹⁶² Thus, rather than viewing these unions as immoral deviance from Jewish law and communal order, they can be examined productively as what Ruth Mazo Karras termed “unmarriages” and as different, unhegemonic forms of union and kinship.¹⁶³ In a fascinating study, Moshe Yagur examines a strange ritual for conversion to Judaism that fuses (and confuses) elements from the biblical concept of “a beautiful woman captured in battle” (Deuteronomy 21:10–14), conversion and concubinage with slaves, suggesting the possibility of thinking of union beyond the normative marital bond.¹⁶⁴

3.6 Names and Kinship Encounters¹⁶⁵

Names are not simply signifiers for individual people. Names are ways for individuals to bestow identity, establish relations and proclaim values.¹⁶⁶ Naming systems are also ways for society to locate and organize its members. As means for establishing relations and marking belonging, names are intertwined with kinship. Like kinship, names are rarely a simple matter. Anyone who had to decide upon a name for a child might recognize the potential for tension between various expectations: individual, familial, communal, and social. Societies may exhibit different types of names or even different naming systems. As loci of such convergences, names are often useful entryways to study kinship encounters.

The usefulness of thinking about names as loci for kinship encounters can be seen in what can be termed “the Abrahamic onomastic contraction.”¹⁶⁷ It is seldomly recognized (and never studied comparatively as far as we know) that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have brought with them a sharp shrinkage in onomastic variety. Very few names are repeated in the Jewish Bible and even when we look at single dynastic lines, like the kings of Judah or Israel, there is very little repetition of names.¹⁶⁸ In later periods, Jews adopted names in a broad variety of languages (Greek, Latin, Persian, Egyptian, Arabic and so on), yet the tendency to repeat names, especially of Biblical origin is unmistakable.¹⁶⁹ By the medieval period, the dominance of a rather narrow selection of biblical and talmudic names is clear.

A similar process is known to have taken place among Christians in Late Antiquity.¹⁷⁰ John Chrysostom (347–407) provides us with a clear rationalization for the process:

I urge this on you too, to call your children by the names of the righteous. In early times […] men used to call their children by the names of their forebears. It was a consolation for death that the departed should seem to live through his name. But this is so no longer. […] So let the name of the saints enter our homes through the naming of our children, to train not only the child but the father, when he reflects that he is the father of John or Elijah or James; for, if the name be given with forethought to pay honor to those that have departed, and we grasp at our kinship with the righteous rather than with our forebears, this too will greatly help us and our children.¹⁷¹

Whether you are converting to Christianity or wishing to strengthen your existing Christian commitment, Chrysostom urges you to let go of ancestral names and forge a kinship with the righteous by bestowing on your child a Christian name. These names come from the limited pool of Christian saints and biblical figures.

Finally, though least studied, a similar process can be detected in Arab names with the spread of Islam.¹⁷² Pre-Islamic Arabs sported a bewildering range of names, however, starting with the Umayyad caliphate, names with good Islamic pedigree start to be repeated.¹⁷³ These good Islamic names include, of course, Arabic version of biblical figures such as Ibrāhīm, Isḥāq, Dāʾūd, Sulaymān, ʿĪsā, and Maryam. Thinking comparatively about what we have termed “the Abrahamic onomastic contraction” suggests both a parallel monotheistic tendency of onomastic contraction as well as a common convergence around a shared pool of biblical names (expressed differently in terms of language and script).¹⁷⁴ Looking at names shows both a way of establishing kinship with past religious icons as well as a field of encounter between the Abrahamic religions.

Another way of using names as loci for kinship encounter is found in the examination of the adoption of Arabic names by Jews and Christians following the Muslim conquests. Two factors make this onomastic change particularly interesting and complex. First, the complex Arabic naming system, with its ʾism, kunya, laqab, and nisba, reflects, according to Jacqueline Sublet, “the convergence of several approaches to identity.”¹⁷⁵ Some of these identities are built upon kinship ties – where one is identified by his or her son, father, family, or tribe. Other identities may also confer relatedness, such as might exist between individuals from the same city, region, trade, legal school, or religious community. So the use of Arabic names comes with a “baggage” of kinship. Second, Arabic names were deeply intertwined with Islamic figures and the new Muslim rulers and so carried Islamic “baggage.” Indeed, in the various versions of the so-called Pact of Umar, non-Muslims promise not to use kunyas: “We will not take names after our sons as they do,” clearly associating the use of kunyas with the new rulers.¹⁷⁶ This association can also be seen as in texts of the non-Muslim communities. In the Apocalypse of Samuel, the head of the monastery of Qalamūn, (Pseudo-Samuel) declares:

Woe upon woe! […] at that time they will move away from uprightness and start to assimilate themselves to the Hagarenes in their actions: they will give their names to their children, discarding the names of the angels, the prophets, the apostles, and the martyrs. […] Do you think there is for the heart a greater pain than to see the Christians abandon their sweet tongue to take pride in the Arabic language and in their names? In truth I tell you, my children, that those who will abandon the names of the saints to give their children Arabic names – those who will act thus will be excluded from the blessings of the saints.¹⁷⁷

Adopting Arabic names was a form of encounter both due to the particular kinship system ingrained in Arabic names as well as their association with the Arab/Muslim rulers.¹⁷⁸

The onomastic change was not limited to the adoption of Arabic names. As Elinoar Bareket suggested, Jews under Islam began using new Hebrew names that were modeled upon Arabic names, such as Yeshuʿa, Mevorakh, Saʿadya, Mevasser and Maṣliaḥ.¹⁷⁹ Even more intriguing is the widespread use of double names among Jews and Christians under Islam, i.e. individuals who have an Arabic name as well as another name in Hebrew, Coptic, Greek, Spanish, etc. While this tendency is widely attested across the medieval Middle East, it remains woefully understudied.¹⁸⁰ Do double names imply double and even split identity? Or do double names imply connectivity and linkage?¹⁸¹ The common wisdom is that non-Muslims used the Arabic name for their public lives in the shared Islamicate society, but needed an internal name for the religious communal rituals like communion or being called up to read the Torah.¹⁸² Yet, studies on double names in pre-Islamic Egypt suggest that double names can have other functions and meanings.¹⁸³ If we take the Jews of medieval Egypt as a test case, it is clear that Hebrew names (in Arabic script) were used in public documents such as Islamic legal documents and that Arabic names (in Hebrew script) were very commonly used in private correspondence. Therefore, the public/communal dichotomy breaks down. More intriguingly, a closer observation shows regular (but never constant) association between Hebrew names and Arabic names.¹⁸⁴ These associations can be based on meaning, like Yeshuʿa = Abū al-Faraj (salvation), Netanʾel = Ḥibat Allah (gift of God); Shemarya = Maḥfūẓ (guarded by God), Yefet = Ḥasan (beautiful), etc. In other cases, the equivalence is based on sound: Ḥalfon = Khalaf, Eli = ʿAli = ʿAllūn, Samuel = Ismāʿīl; Peraḥya = Abū al-Surūr (peraḥya sounds like Arabic faraḥ which means happiness and is expressed also by Abū al-Surūr). Finally, the association can be based on biblical context: Judah is often Arabic Asad or Sibāʿ (meaning lion due to “Judah is a lion cub” in Genesis 49:9), Ephraim is usually Abū Kathīr (meaning “plentiful” due to the meaning of the Hebrew root and Jacob’s blessing to Ephraim in Genesis 48:19).¹⁸⁵ These equivalencies were not always used, but in the cases they were used we may wonder whether we are really dealing with double names, or a single name with different linguistic manifestations. More interestingly, while using an Arabic name meant that Jews take on a certain aspect of Arabness, by linking these names to specific Hebrew names, and occasionally to specific biblical references, they were investing this Arabness with Jewish meaning. Such names were the site of cultural encounter and allowed Jews to hold on to the kinship with biblical ancestors while belonging to the new Islamicate Arab society.