Call for Papers

Date: December 6-8, 2021

Venue: Witte Singel, Leiden, Netherlands

Abstract Submission Deadline: March 31, 2021

We invite submissions for an international conference on the language of kinship in Islamic(ate) societies before the modern period (622–1500 CE). The Embedding Conquest (EmCo) team has been investigating the social, political, administrative, religious, and economic ties that sustained strategies and mechanics of protection and dependency in the early Islamic empire, contributing to shaping imperial rule under the Umayyads and the Abbasids. As part of our project, we study how writers and document producers expressed vertical and horizontal relationships, including the use of family terms. We now invite other researchers to join in our conversation focusing on relational ties that were expressed primarily through or as kinship.

We are interested in exploring how and when the language of kinship was implemented as a persuasive device, an operative category, and a problem-solving mechanism in premodern Islamic(ate) societies. When did the writers of our sources deploy kinship to describe or create group solidarity? What alternatives to kinship were used, instead, as a basis for expressing social cohesion? When was kinship construed for making claims? When was kinship invoked, and when was it deliberately omitted?

The conference will revolve around three major themes:

• dynastic rule: presentations centered on caliphal and other ruling dynasties, sultanates, imamates, royal households, dynastic claims, and marriage politics;

• family ties: presentations centered on kinship as part of family relations, households, consanguinity, adoption, property rights, and family law;

• kinship outside the family: presentations centered on kinship as part of non-familial relations, tribal affiliation, spiritual kinship, slavery, clientship, and patronage.

Among ongoing research projects centered on kinship, we would like to signal one based at the University of Bristol and one based at the University of Haifa.

More information on: Embedding Conquest