Research Focus

Kinship and Community in the Early and Medieval Islamic Mediterranean was an international research group organized by Prof. Uriel Simonsohn and Dr. Oded Zinger with support from the Haifa Center for Mediterranean History. The project examined the overlapping—and sometimes competing—claims of family, kinship, and confessional community in lands under Islamic rule.

Central Questions

The formation of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim confessional communities did not displace family ties. The group therefore asked how religious leaderships negotiated blood relations, marriage, inheritance, and household obligations when these crossed communal boundaries. Did kinship challenge allegiance to the qahal, ecclesia, or umma? When did it instead provide a resource for sustaining communal life?

The project also explored forms of fictive kinship and the ways leaders and laypeople used familial language, ritual, and social practice to create, reinforce, or resist collective identities.

Themes

• Emotion, affection, and familial obligation
• Rites of passage, education, and socialization
• Gender, sexuality, marriage, and reproduction
• Property rights, inheritance, and intergenerational transfer
• Domestic, communal, and public space
• Individual agency within kinship and confessional structures
• Violence, law, persuasion, and communal discipline

Sources and Method

Participants worked comparatively across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources and paid close attention to genre, circulation, and authorial purpose. Narrative and documentary texts were read not only for the social arrangements they describe but also for their literary patterns, scriptural allusions, and efforts to edify, regulate, or condemn.

Meetings and Outcomes

The first workshop was held at the University of Haifa on 2–3 December 2018, followed by a second meeting at the University of Oxford on 9–10 January 2020. The cumulative project was designed to lead toward a final conference and an edited volume.

This research also connects to Prof. Simonsohn’s broader work on conversion, religious boundaries, and interreligious family relations. See the related project on Cultural Brokerage in Pre-Modern Islam and the full publications list.