Marriage

The Political Economy of Kinship Fatima Abdul Rahman Abstract Marriage is so closely associated today with romantic attachment, sexual intimacy, and individual choice that these features can easily be mistaken for universal characteristics of the institution. The marriage practices preserved in accounts of pre-Islamic Arabia invite a different interpretation. In societies in which kinship, lineage, property, protection, political alliance, and honor were closely intertwined, marriage could serve purposes that cannot be adequately explained through sexuality alone. Polygyny further complicates the modern assumption that every marital relationship represents a singular romantic and sexual bond, while practices associated with the appropriation of widows, ẓihār, and marriages arranged by families reveal relationships whose initiating logic could lie elsewhere. The Qur’anic regulation of marriage and kinship subsequently altered important aspects of this order by defining prohibited relationships, limiting customary claims over women, and establishing specified rights in property and inheritance. Examining these practices together reveals not simply a different history of marriage, but a different way of organizing social relationships, and exposes the danger of projecting the assumptions of the modern marital system onto societies governed by very different arrangements of kinship and power. The Political Economy of Marriage Few social institutions appear more familiar to modern people than marriage. In contemporary societies, particularly those in which monogamy is the prevailing legal and social norm, marriage is ordinarily imagined as a relationship between two individuals whose emotional and sexual attachment provides its central rationale. Economic considerations, family expectations, religion, social status, and political or […]