Family and Households in History

Abstract

From March 18-20, 2004, the American University in Cairo (AUC) hosted its annual history seminar entitled “Family and Households in History.” Dr. Nelly Hanna, chair of the Arab Studies department, welcomed the participants and audience and explained that the sessions would cover the institution of family from various perspectives and present its different roles and patterns throughout history. The first session dealt with the family both philosophically and legally. Wolf Gazo (philosophy professor, AUC) tackled the issue of individual freedom and the concept of family morality. He compared the family in the Orient with that of Europe and North America, as well as each pattern’s flexibility, including individual freedom. Edward Metenier (Institute Français du Proche Orient, Damascus) studied the pattern of one Iraqi family and made it his model for analyzing the strong ties between family members. He also focused on how one member’s achievement of major prestige affected other members by raising them to high social positions. Thus, this one family enjoyed a high status for the whole nineteenth century, despite the political and economic changes in Iraq during that time. After a coffee break, Judith Tucker (Georgetown University, USA) presented a paper on redefining the family and marital relations after modernization. According to her, legal reforms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were inspired by the western model, did not really revolutionize the family or redefine marital relations. Rather, these reforms transformed the most rigid Islamic traditions into laws that would be difficult to change. The seminar also considered different family patterns in other parts of world. Thus, Sonia Tamimy (Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Economiques, Juridiques et Sociales [CEDEJ], Cairo) presented the views of famous French historians on the family and showed that the view of family changed according to changes in society and its morals ...