is placed hierarchically before the value of affinity.
The topic of the general life process is encoun-
tered again in the field of religion and cosmology.
Here, the meaning of the life process is constituted
in conflict with the concepts of the newly arising so-
called orthodox Islam. It is the relationship of the
female body to Islamic purity rules which is formu-
lated differently. In the life cycle rituals of the qırx
(literally “forty”), female impurity after marriage
and birth is no longer negatively defined, as part of
the social exclusion of women. Quite the contrary,
female impurity and fertility stipulate each other
and are dependent on one another.Bibliography
S. Baçtu‘and N. Hortaçsu, The price of value. Kinship,
marriage and meta-narratives of gender in Turk-
menistan, in F. Acar and A. Güneç-Ayata (eds.), Gender
and identity construction. Women of Central Asia, the
Caucasus and Turkey, Leiden 2000, 117–40.
P. Bourdieu, Outline of a theory of practice, trans.
R. Nice, Cambridge 1976.
R. Callois and G. E. von Grunebaum (eds.),Le rêve et les
sociétés humaines, Paris 1967.
J. Collier and S. Yanagisako, Gender and kinship, Stan-
ford 1987.
T. Dragadze, Islam in Azerbaijan. The position of women,
in C. F. El-Sohl and J. Mabro (eds.), Muslim women’s
choices. Religious belief and social reality, Oxford
1994, 152–63.
M. Fortes, The structure of unilineal descent groups, in
American Anthropologist55 (1951), 17–41.
H. A. Habilov, Ethnography of Azerbaijan[in Azeri],
Baku 1991.
L. Holy, Kinship, honour and solidarity. Cousin marriage
in the Middle East, Manchester, England 1989.
A. Kuper, Lineage theory. A critical retrospect, in Annual
Review of Anthropology11 (1982), 71–92.
J. Marcus, A world of difference. Islam and gender hier-
archy in Turkey, London 1992.
I. Pfluger-Schindlbeck, Verwandtschaft, Religion und Gesch-
lecht in Aserbaidschan, Reichert Verlag (forthcoming).
N. Tohidi, Gender and national identity in post-Soviet
Azerbaijan. A regional perspective, in F. Acar and
A. Güneç-Ayata (eds.), Gender and identity construction.
Women of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey,
Leiden 2000, 249–92.Ingrid Pfluger-SchindlbeckSouth AsiaIntroduction
Officially, Islam entered South Asia in 712 C.E.,
with the conquest of Sindh by an Arab general, but
the rise of Islam in Arabia impacted South Asia
much earlier, since trade in the Indian Ocean area
had existed since prehistoric times. Much of this
impact was mediated by women – a fact largely
ignored by history books that tell only of conquer-
ing “Muslim armies,” forcible conversions, and338 kinship, descent systems and state
gentle Sufi persuasion. These early female media-
tors were South Asian non-Muslims who attended
to and lived, possibly in mut≠amarriages (Bouchon
1986), with merchants, sailors, and fishermen from
the Gulf and the Hadramawt, who had converted
to the new faith. Later South Asian non-Muslim
women even lived with East African slave converts
traded by Arabs and Persians till the late nineteenth
century. Living over generations as wives, mothers,
and daughters with Muslim men, these women
combined the new faith with much of their pre-
Islamic (notably Hindu or Buddhist) cultures. From
the thirteenth century onwards Muslim women
from Iran and Central Asia came in as wives, com-
panions, and slaves of the elite, and transmitted to
their descendants their blend of pre-Islamic and
Islamic practice – often construed in the South
Asian setting as “ideally Muslim.” Between the
ninth and the twentieth centuries Muslim women in
South Asia toiled as peasants, pastoralists, profes-
sional craftswomen, and artistes; they ruled over
territories and lived as bonded labor; they were
among the fabulously wealthy and the abject desti-
tute; they acquiesced with invading powers and
resisted them, as for example in the struggle against
British colonialism. Today, South Asian Muslim
women play complex roles in the broader frame-
work of relations between Muslims and non-
Muslims at the levels of both community and state.
This entry touches upon some of the numerous
issues concerning Muslim women, kinship, and
Islam in different South Asian states with large
Muslim populations – Bangladesh (ca. 130 mil-
lion), India (ca. 150 million), Maldives (ca. 0.30
million), Nepal (ca. 0.96 million), Pakistan (ca. 145
million), and Sri Lanka (ca. 1.35 million). At the
outset it must be stressed that there has always been
great variation within every region and micro-
region, according to specific community, locality,
particular religious denomination, and, above all,
class.Descent, ranking, and
community
Transmission of nationality in South Asia is a
male prerogative in Bangladesh and Pakistan and
was so in India till 1992. Most South Asian com-
munities were and are patrilineal and patrifocal,
and the advent of Islam brought little change, if any.
The primacy of agnatic kin is marked even when
kinship terminology is bilateral, as among the
Pakistani Baluch (Pastner 1978). More bilinear in
practice, but not in ideology are the Sidi of Gujarat,
India (Basu 1995). The few matrilineal communi-