Thanks to a generous grant from the Haifa Center for Mediterranean History (HCMH), Dr. Oded Zinger of the Hebrew University and I are organizing an international research group on the topic of 'Kinship and Community in the Early and Medieval Islamic Mediterranean'.
The principal objective of this group is to discuss and assess cases of overlapping and competing loyalties between kinship and confessional attachments in early and medieval Islamic dominated lands. The pivotal role of kinship ties at the base of social arrangements deserves particular notice in relation to one of the period's most notable hallmarks– the formation of confessional communities, or salvation communities. It is here that we might ask, for example, whether blood and marriage ties posed a challenge or offered an opportunity for confessional leaderships that sought to enjoin the members of their respective communities to pay primary allegiance to the qahal, ecclesia, and umma? And what sort of fictive kinships were used by leaders and laymen to form or resist such communities?
While the Mediterranean constitutes its main spatial framework, our inquiry will comprise of Islamic settings that lie beyond the Mediterranean. We envision the group exploring the tension between kinship and community through a joint study of texts of diverse confessional provenance and genre, focusing on displays of emotions and sentiments; socialization processes (rites of passage, education, etc.); gender roles, sexuality and reproduction; property rights and property transfer (both between families and across generations); the organization of physical space (private, familial, communal and public); the place of the individual; violence, law and persuasion. These themes will be deliberated with close attendance to their literary manifestations, in particular the nature of the sources (e.g. narrative vs. documentary, genre, and circulation), literary patterns (e.g. tropes, topoi, and scriptural allusions), and objectives (e.g. edifying, regulating, and condemning).
The group consists of scholars whose research engages with the theme of kinship and community in the context of early and medieval Islam.
Our intention is to convene four times over a period of 3 years, out of which two meetings will take place at the University of Haifa and two at the University of Oxford. Each of the first three meetings will be conducted in a workshop format, at the course of which participants will present and discuss a text or texts of their choice. The fourth and last meeting will be organized as a conference and the entire cumulative endeavor is planned to yield a publication of an edited volume, to which all participants will be invited to contribute.
The first meeting took place at the University of Haifa on December 2-3, 2018, and second meeting is planned to take place at the University of Oxford on January 9-10, 2020.
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For additional information - http://hcmh.haifa.ac.il/index.php/academic-activity/research-groups/16-academic-activity/118-kinship-and-community-in-the-early-and-medieval-islamic-mediterranean