Arab StatesAlthough the Arab world is geographically vast
and features considerable sociocultural diversity,
its peoples have in common patrilineal kinship, a
way of organizing kin relations that places empha-
sis on agnatic descent groups. Patrilineages have long
formed the basis for other modes of social organi-
zation, including the tribe and the state (Khoury
and Kostiner 1990). They may have been preceded
by matrilineages in pre-Islamic Arabia (Keddie
1991), although this is disputed. Matrilineal rela-
tions remain important during an individual’s life-
time and provide an alternative to the idealized
patrilineal family (Joseph 2000, 125). However,
they do not persist structurally through time as do
patrilineages.
Impingement by kinship modalities on systems of
governance, and the reverse phenomenon, have
occupied analysts of Arab societies at least since the
advent of Islam. For Ibn Khaldun, writing in the
fourteenth century, a successful society is best
organized along kinship lines, which naturally pro-
duce ≠asabiyya(group feeling) (1969, 98). He even
argued that a successful caliph needed this in addi-
tion to the requisite divine mandate to rule (ibid.,
160). But he then noted that the Qur±àn discour-
ages it, citing Qur±àn 49:13 and its admonishment
to leave behind “pride in ancestry,” allowing that,
“still, we find that Mohammed censured groupfeel-
ing and urged us to reject it and leave it alone”
(ibid.). Anthropologist E. R. Wolf also regards the
advent of Islam as introducing a new concept of
territoriality – one based on religion rather than
kin relationships, breaking with “the traditional
notion of a territory’s belonging to a certain kin
group and representing its inviolable property”
(2001, 109).
Despite these early mitigations, however, observ-
ers have argued that the Arab family “constitutes
the dominant social institution through which per-
sons and groups inherit their religious, class, and
cultural affiliations. It also provides security and
support in times of individual and societal stress”
(Barakat 1993, 98). A significant number of theo-
rists have argued that Arab states both encompass
and are constituted by this dominant social insti-
tution in what is both a fraught and inextricable
relationship whether in “weak” states, such as
Kinship and State
Lebanon, or “strong” states, such as Ba≠thist Iraq,
and that Arab family structures have proven re-
markably adaptive to political change.Cultural logics of kinship and
state
Many people in Arab and Mediterranean soci-
eties adhere to a cultural logic in which the male/
female binary is strongly linked to thinking about
territoriality, autochthony, governance, and succes-
sion and in which woman is to soil as man is to seed
(Delaney 1992), sovereignty over land is akin to
sexual consummation (Layoun 2001), and mar-
riage (for a man) is like the purchase of a plot of
land (Bourdieu 1977, 46). The metaphorical and
lived similarities between political and kinship sys-
tems are multiple. Peteet (1992, 176) argues that
the Arab family is fundamentally male-centered,
even when circumstances work against this as in
the case of Palestinian families in which men are
absent from the household due to migration for
political or economic reasons. Others have theo-
rized that Arab states are likewise male-centered,
bestowing their fullest citizenship rights only on
men (for example, Joseph 2000), that Arab kin
groups famously seek to acquire and maintain
honor while avoiding shame (for example, Peris-
tiany 1966), and that the bodies of the women and
girls who are members of the lineage, and by exten-
sion the clan or tribe and state, are their most pow-
erful repository. Kin groups restrict/protect these
living repositories from non-kin, usually by limit-
ing mobility and autonomy, through social pressure
within affectively close communities linked by
“patriarchal connectivity” (Joseph 1993). Corre-
spondingly, Arab states limit women through jural
codes, such as in Saudi Arabia, where they are not
allowed to drive or to be seen in public unaccom-
panied by a male kinsman. As with kin groups, the
goal is protection from exogenous threats, includ-
ing “the age-old antagonism between Islam and
Christendom... [which] created an area of cul-
tural resistance around women and the family”
(Kandiyoti 1991, 7).
In all Arab states, then, it appears that patrilineal
kinship, or what Joseph (1997, 80) calls “patriar-
chal kinship” forms the model for the state. This
model has endured through the centuries and, dur-
ing the past hundred years, since the demise of the