Family History in the Middle East

Abstract

The study of families and their histories opens up a cross-disciplinary dialogue among anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists, including area specialists. The content of Doumani’s edited book, Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender, falls convincingly into such disciplines as history, anthropology, Middle East studies, women’s/gender studies, and Islamic studies, since the collection of articles provides various indepth case studies drawn both from Islam and from political, economic, legal, and social perspectives. The anthology’s main theme suggests that the family is an entity that, along with the progression of history, evolves continuously. By reconstructing the family histories of elites and ordinary people in the Middle East from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the book challenges prevailing assumptions about the monolithic “traditional” Middle Eastern family type. Instead, it argues cogently that the structure and boundaries of these families have always been flexible and dynamic. The book is divided into four sections that explore issues concerning the family from the perspective of politics, economics, and law. In the first section, “Family and Household,” Philippe Fargues, Tomoki Okawara, and Mary Ann Fay analyze the structure of the nineteenth-century family and household and illustrate how its formation was influenced by changes in the ...