Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East by Uriel Simonsohn;

Author:Uriel Simonsohn; [Simonsohn, Uriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192699121
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

The liminal position of non-Muslim women

The retention of kinship ties with non-Muslim family members is further attested in ecclesiastical regulations and canons laws, geonic responsa, and Islamic legal principles. These refer to the role of non-Muslim women as links, if not mediators, between families of different religious affiliations. As wives of Muslim husbands, some of them recent converts, it was thanks to their simultaneous participation in the affairs of their Muslim household and in those of their non-Muslim family and community that they were in a position to forge meaningful ties between their Muslim and non-Muslim kin.

As mediating figures, passing through religious boundaries that were now compromised by kinship attachments, non-Muslim women rendered communal boundaries permeable. It is here that we should refer back to the features of Near Eastern urban family arrangements, recalling their complexity which, to a large extent, was dictated by their multiple social utilities. By noting the religious affiliation of non-Muslim women who were implicated in such entangled kinship arrangements, we may begin thinking of them as individuals who stood and operated in between religious communities, serving as links between members of discrete religious communities and as couriers of religious ideas and practices across these communities.

Signs of this dual standing of non-Muslim women are attested from the very beginning of the Islamic era. The canon laws and legal regulations that were issued by the leaders of the East and West Syrian Churches against intermarriage targeted Christian women who sought to continue partaking in the communal lives of their Christian congregations while married to non-Christian husbands.16 An illustration of this state of affairs can be found in an answer of the West Syrian bishop Jacob of Edessa (r. 64–9/684–9, 89/708) to the priest Addai, regarding the permissibility of giving communion to a Christian woman who married a Muslim (mhaggrāyā).17 While the bishop encouraged the woman’s participation in communal service, the question alone lends itself to an image of Christian women who were simultaneously bound to a Muslim household and a Christian community. As we saw in the previous chapter, the phenomenon of Christian women married to non-Christian husbands was well anticipated already in the Gospels and the writings of the Church Fathers. Its persistence into the early and medieval Islamic periods reflects an ambivalent approach on the part of ecclesiastical leaders. Their failure to curtail instances in which Christian women married outside the fold resulted in attempts to minimize the negative effects of the problem by encouraging these women to raise their children as Christians. We shall come back to the matter later on. The point which should be noted at this stage, however, pertains to the mediating role of such Christian women. As wives of Muslim husbands who continued to partake in the congregational life of their Christian communities, these women were most likely sustaining not only spiritual contacts with their coreligionists but also kinship relations with members of their natal family.

Although recorded in different contexts and in relation to different circumstances, instances of marital ties

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.