volume ii, ewic
With Volume II, EWIC launches the first of four
volumes dedicated to substantive topics of rele-
vance to women and Islamic cultures globally.
These four volumes, Volumes II–V (Volume VI is
the cumulative index), are unusual in that each vol-
ume is topically organized. Within each volume, we
maintain the conventional alphabetical listing of
entries. Volume II brings together over 360 entries
on women, family, law, politics, and Islamic cul-
tures around the world. The Editors solicited
entries on these topics in relationship to each other
because of the historical and contemporary inter-
weaving of these issues in Islamic cultures. Family
is always a subject of law and politics in any state
level society. States are always invested in what is
defined as family and in the regulation of the activ-
ities of families as collectivities and of the persons
ensconced within families. In many regions of the
world, especially in the Middle East, family is
defined as the basic unit of society (rather than the
individualized citizen) and state actors mediate
their relationships to state citizens through family
structures, family relations, family idioms, and
family moralities. State projects and state visions of
the family as an idea and concrete family relation-
ships are often translated into and transported
through law and legal practices. In many Muslim
majority countries, and even in some Muslim min-
ority countries (such as India), the arena of family
law that covers marriage, divorce, child custody,
and inheritance is assigned to religious courts. The
delegation of family law to religious courts in these
states does not mean that the state is not interested
in family or family law. In some of these states, reli-
gious clerics are salaried by the state or serve under
the supervision of the state. In some cases where
state law is promulgated, state family law may be
influenced by Islamic law (Iraq, Egypt). Regardless
of the specific articulations, however, states rarely
ignore family structure and ideology. Law rarely is
indifferent to the reality that most people live
within families. And families and persons are rarely
unaware or completely oblivious to the operations
of law and politics in their lives. The topics covered
in this volume do not exhaust the range of issues
which intertwine family, law, and politics as many
of these topics (labor, health, education, work,
Preface
environment, and the like) are taken up in other
volumes. What we set out to do in Volume II, then,
is to bring together the core matters of state func-
tioning, especially through law, in relation to family.
We began with a list of 109 topics. Of these, just
under three dozen were originally defined as over-
views on large topics. Some of the overviews were
the single entry on a large topic, such as the over-
views of apostasy and milk kinship. Other overviews
were structured as introductions to a series of re-
gional entries on those topics, such as the overviews
of civil society and honor. During the development
of Volume II, some overviews were changed and
others added as we faced the constraints of author
solicitations.
The non-overview topics of the original 109 were
designed to generate a series of entries for each
region of the world. How many such entries each
topic generated and how those entries were defined
by country or groups of countries was left to the
Associate Editors responsible for each region. The
Associate Editors faced enormous hurdles in find-
ing authors for each of the remaining 75 topics.
They had to decide what countries to group
together for specific topics, which topics to do
country by country, and which topics to cover on a
larger regional basis. For some topics, the geo-
graphic divisions seemed, to some degree, self-evi-
dent, while others were not at all clear. On many
topics, how countries were grouped together
depended almost entirely on finding authors who
had the expertise (and time) to write. Entry bound-
aries were at times driven by author expertise as
much as they were by country boundaries. A degree
of unevenness and inconsistency in the the geo-
graphical content of entries resulted which was
unavoidable. This inconsistency is productive in
many ways, as it reminds us that geographical
boundaries are not “natural,” but the outcomes of
historical and political processes which may not be
congruent with social and cultural processes.
Another unavoidable inconsistency is the re-
gional/country gaps in coverage from one topic to
another. In all cases, the Associate Editors made
every effort to cover all regions for all topics. We
realized this grand ambition could not be achieved
for a number of reasons. Research simply does not
exist on some topics for some regions. Where re-
search does exist, we were not always able to find