This thesis will demonstrate how prosopographical methods can be used to provide a narrative of social change for the Quraysh tribe of Late Antiquity. By applying these methods to records of their marriage behaviour, it will be shown that the pre-Islamic Quraysh led a far more marginal existence than is widely thought, and that in the post- Islamic period they were surprisingly flexible with regard to their marriage practices and ideas on group membership. The first three chapters focus on historiography and methodology. Chapter One introduces the methodological preliminaries that lie at the heart of this research; these concern the nature of the data, the manner in which it is extracted and the way it will be structured within databases. Issues regarding the quality and reliability of the marital records as preserved in the nasab (tr: genealogical) literary tradition are also discussed in this section. Chapter Two provides a historiography of the nasab tradition, paying particular attention to the nature of its emergence and the possible effects of social and cultural contexts on the quality of the marriage data. This provides the groundwork for Chapter Three which focuses more narrowly on the work from which most of our data are extracted – the Nasab Quraysh of al-Zubayrī (d. 851). The remaining five chapters outline how the data within the nasab tradition can be analysed and incorporated into existing secondary scholarship. Chapters Four and Five establish that the data show a rapid rise in concubinage at the same time as the Arab military conquests of the seventh century. This has implications for our current consensus on the nature of marriage and identity in the seventh and eighth centuries. Chapters Six to Eight investigate the marriages made by the Quraysh to Arab women in the sixth to eighth centuries, and will show how practice adapted to context. To conclude, it will be argued that this investigation not only establishes the high quality of the marriage data as preserved in the nasab tradition, but also the enormous potential of prosopographical methods when applied to the study of early Islamic history.

This thesis concerns female Islamic dress, the hijab, in contemporary urban Finland. The hijab is not merely a symbol or an inevitable embodiment of either female oppression or agency, but rather is a form of dress that is simultaneously social, mental, material, and spatial. The approach developed here captures the multiple dimensions of the hijab as it is lived and experienced. The thesis draws upon ideas from a range of social theorists, including Bourdieu, Lefebvre, Goffman, and Gramsci. These ideas are deployed to understand the conscious and semi-conscious dress strategies and practices that veiling Muslim women use to manage various everyday issues and challenges. I investigate questions concerning how social, material and spatial relations both impact upon, and are negotiated by, the wearing of the hijab. The research was conducted in Helsinki using ethnographic methods, such as semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The main groups of informants were Finnish converts to Islam, Somalis, and Shi'a Muslims from Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the sample covered women of various ages, educational backgrounds, and professional positions. The empirical chapters are organised according to four major themes: Politics, Materiality, Performance, and Visibility in Public Space. According to the findings, Muslim women in Finland negotiate their dress strategies with reference to Finnish ‘mainstream' society, religious doctrine and the demands of their particular ethnic communities. Dress strategies and practices are found to be bound up in complex but identifiable ways with factors such as fashion markets and dress availability, diverse modes of embodiment and habituation, and the socio-spatial relations which produce and are produced by the Finnish built environment. In sum, by focussing on the lived experience of wearing the hijab, many of the more simplistic politicised understandings of Muslim women and their characteristic forms of dress can be challenged and superseded.

This is the first focused study of the Society of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most influential and organised social and political movement in Kuwait, from its beginnings in 1946up to2000. It focuses on the circumstances surrounding the emergence and development of the Muslim Brotherhood as part of a general Islamic revival in Kuwait. It argues that the Muslim Brotherhood was driven first and foremost by cultural considerations and that Kuwaiti secularists regarded it as a challenge to their growing influence in both the political domain (traditionally controlled by the ruling family) and the social domain (historically under the control of the religious establishment). The resulting conflict with secularists over the social domain posed a serious threat to the Muslim Brotherhood who considered themselves an extension of the traditional religious establishment. They also viewed the secularists’ attempts to reshape Kuwaiti identity as a threat to Kuwait’s Islamic identity. This prompted the Muslim Brotherhood to channel all their social, educational and political efforts towards reclaiming the social domain. This study focuses also on the mechanisms adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood, ones which combined Islamic values with modern mobilisation strategies producing a dynamic Islamist movement seeking to revive the golden age of Islam through modern means. The movement maintained a pyramid hierarchy and it refashioned modern economic theory to make it more compatible with Islamic teachings. It also established a Muslim Boy Scouts movement and an Islamic press, while it reformed other organisations to make them compatible with Islamic values. All this was done in an effort to implement Hasan al-Banna’s vision of fashioning a pious Muslim individual, a virtuous family and, finally, a true Muslim state. The Muslim Brotherhood’s comprehensive and sweeping agenda seeks the complete transformation of social conditions. The Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait was not very different from its mother organisation in Egypt. It played a pioneering role in revising Islamic banking, developing charity work and challenging secularism. The Kuwaiti political system supported the Muslim Brotherhood in its struggle against secularists, but the Muslim Brotherhood nonetheless stayed out of politics, focusing on rehabilitating the social domain, in the interests of maintaining on good terms with the ruling family.

The present thesis has been designed to discuss how the minimum age for marriage has been determined in Islamic Fiqh with a focus on the case study of the Family Law No 36 of 2010 in Jordan. It is the contention of the present researcher that the marriage of minors cannot comply with the guidance of both the Holy Quran and Hadith because neither specified a clear cut minimum age for marriage. A considerable confusion exists among Muslim scholars regarding the determination of the minimum age for marriage leading to the prevalence of child marriage in some Muslim societies. This confusion has arisen when Muslim scholars have sought to derive the minimum age for marriage from de – contextualised verses of the Holy Quran and texts of the Hadith that refer to the physical and natural symptoms of puberty and encourage both young men and women to marry at an early age. In order to fully examine such a problematic issue, identify the root causes lying behind it and, hopefully make a contribution towards solving it, the present study has sought to jurisprudentially contextualise such an issue within the Islamic Fiqh. The researcher has argued that determining the appropriate age for marriage based on the original context of pertinent verses of the Holy Quran and texts of the Hadith as well as the international criteria for human rights is the sole legal guarantee that safeguards the right of women to express their full and free consent to marriage.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.