Family and Households in History

From March 18-20, 2004, the American University in Cairo (AUC) hostedits annual history seminar entitled “Family and Households in History.” Dr.Nelly Hanna, chair of the Arab Studies department, welcomed the participantsand audience and explained that the sessions would cover the institutionof family from various perspectives and present its different roles andpatterns throughout history.The first session dealt with the family both philosophically and legally.Wolf Gazo (philosophy professor, AUC) tackled the issue of individualfreedom and the concept of family morality. He compared the family in theOrient with that of Europe and North America, as well as each pattern’sflexibility, including individual freedom. Edward Metenier (InstituteFrançais du Proche Orient, Damascus) studied the pattern of one Iraqi familyand made it his model for analyzing the strong ties between familymembers. He also focused on how one member’s achievement of majorprestige 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) presenteda paper on redefining the family and marital relations after modernization.According to her, legal reforms during the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, which were inspired by the western model, did not really revolutionizethe family or redefine marital relations. Rather, these reforms transformedthe most rigid Islamic traditions into laws that would be difficult tochange. The seminar also considered different family patterns in other partsof world. Thus, Sonia Tamimy (Centre d’Etudes et de DocumentationEconomiques, Juridiques et Sociales [CEDEJ], Cairo) presented the viewsof famous French historians on the family and showed that the view of familychanged according to changes in society and its morals ...