Family and Households in History

Abstract

From March 18-20, 2004, the American University in Cairo (AUC) hosted
its annual history seminar entitled “Family and Households in History.” Dr.
Nelly Hanna, chair of the Arab Studies department, welcomed the participants
and audience and explained that the sessions would cover the institution
of family from various perspectives and present its different roles and
patterns throughout history.
The first session dealt with the family both philosophically and legally.
Wolf Gazo (philosophy professor, AUC) tackled the issue of individual
freedom and the concept of family morality. He compared the family in the
Orient with that of Europe and North America, as well as each pattern’s
flexibility, including individual freedom. Edward Metenier (Institute
Français du Proche Orient, Damascus) studied the pattern of one Iraqi family
and made it his model for analyzing the strong ties between family
members. He also focused on how one member’s achievement of major
prestige affected other members by raising them to high social positions.
Thus, this one family enjoyed a high status for the whole nineteenth century,
despite the political and economic changes in Iraq during that time.
After a coffee break, Judith Tucker (Georgetown University, USA) presented
a paper on redefining the family and marital relations after modernization.
According to her, legal reforms during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, which were inspired by the western model, did not really revolutionize
the family or redefine marital relations. Rather, these reforms transformed
the most rigid Islamic traditions into laws that would be difficult to
change. The seminar also considered different family patterns in other parts
of world. Thus, Sonia Tamimy (Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation
Economiques, Juridiques et Sociales [CEDEJ], Cairo) presented the views
of famous French historians on the family and showed that the view of family
changed according to changes in society and its morals ...