Structure of the Nuclear Family in the Wake of Genetics and Reproductive Technologies (FGRT)

Coming soon!

Kristin Monroe
Visiting Researcher

Kristin Monroe is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY U.S.A. Her research has concerned automobile technology, geographic mobility, and social life in Beirut, Lebanon in both historical and contemporary eras. This research has produced publications including The Insecure City: Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut (Rutgers University Press, 2016) as well as articles in journals such History and Anthropology (2017), PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (2016), Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2014), Anthropology of Work Review (2014), and City & Society (2011).

With this research background, Kristin brings to the FGRT project a valuable perspective on how the uses and understandings of technologies both shape and are shaped by the social and cultural contexts in which they are harnessed. Her contribution to the FGRT project will be two-fold. First, she will conduct an extensive review of the social scientific literature on the topic of assisted reproductive and genetic technologies in the Muslim world, with a particular focus on the Middle East. This also includes, to the extent possible, Muslim populations in minority settings. Paying close attention to the local moral and ethical worlds in which these technologies are situated and utilized, this review will entail an analysis of what, until now, social scientists have found to be the impact of these technologies on the experiences, conceptions, and framings of the nuclear family. This critical examination of the literature aims to identify key approaches as well as lacunae. This work will be shared/disseminated mainly in the form of an academic publication that will constitute important source material for current and future scholars developing research projects in this area of study.

Second, Kristin will pursue relevant and possible models for undertaking an original social scientific study that investigates the impact of genetic and assisted reproductive technologies on the nuclear family with a particular focus on the Qatari context. Drawing on the intellectual directions and scholarly materials already developed through the Islamic Bioethics Project, she will concentrate on underexplored areas of scholarship in light of the literature review phase. This research seeks to address key theoretical questions, both within but also beyond frameworks of the Middle East and the Muslim world, about the meanings and understandings of important concepts such as pregnancy, maternity, paternity, and family in the wake of these technologies.

Delfina Serrano Ruano
Visiting Researcher

Delfina Serrano Ruano is a PhD tenured researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in Madrid, Spain. She is a member of the research group “Islamology: past and present of the shari`a through its textual tradition.” Results of her work have appeared in both Spanish and international academic journals like: Al-Qantara, Islamic Law and Society, Der Islam, Hawwa, and Bulletin d’Etudes Orientales.

Delfina’s contribution to the FGRT project examines ongoing discussions about the perceived conflict between modern medical technologies –DNA tests in particular- and the mechanisms traditionally admitted by the sharī`a to establish paternity, in the light of classical Islamic legal discourses (fiqh) on filiation and the family. This work is circumscribed to a number of Muslim majority countries where civil status and family issues are now governed by codifications of the relevant provisions found in pre-modern manuals of Mālikī jurisprudence. Fatawa issued by the local ulema, legal elaborations in fiqh manuals, statements by the official bodies in charge of religious affairs in each country, legal codes, notarial practice, reports in the press and the media, information in blogs and web pages, and secondary literature in Arabic will be examined, adding a historical philological approach to the sociological, anthropological and Western legal perspective with which the subject has been analyzed so far. The relationship between contemporary bio-medicine and traditional ways to establish paternity and filiation will also be examined in connection with the issue of pregnancy since its legal duration is today fixed for a period between six months and one year, contrary to the much longer limits admitted by classical fiqh (up to five years in the case of the Mālikīs).

Delfina’s interest in the role of biology for the definition of the family and the ensuing rights and obligations developed out of her work on classical Mālikī doctrine and practice on zinà (unlawful sexual relations) which led her to reflect on the challenges posed by DNA tests to the rationale behind the harsh punishments applying to zinà (i.e. preventing the “mixing of genealogies (ikhtilāṭ al-ansāb)”. From the punitive and dissuasive dimensions of the relevant jurisprudence, her attention shifted to jurists’ strategies to foster the family and social stability by accommodating transgression and by balancing the harshest consequences of the very moral and legal order devised by them. Following this thread she have more recently concentrated on denial of the paternity of a child through imprecatory oath (li`ān) following an unproven accusation of adultery of a man against his wife.

Recent reforms in three countries belonging to the area of influence of the Mālikī school of law –Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria– represent the boldest steps taken so far in the adjustment between biological and legal paternity on the one hand, and between sharī`a’s legal and moral vision of the family and international standards in women’s and children’s rights, on the other. However disparate the modern so-called codifications of the sharī`a are from classical fiqh manuals in their methodology, contents and scope, their authority continues to rely on their apparent consistency with the latter rather than on the power of the state to promulgate, implement and amend these codes. Religious arguments are wielded to hamper reform and explain resistance to its application by judges, or are thought to slow down the assimilation of change by society at large. Reform and change, in order to be acceptable, have to be grounded in religious arguments (i.e. Mālikī interpretations of religious orthodoxy and of sharī`a compliant social conduct) and textual precedents. Yet the sharī`a position regarding the family is at times subject to competing interpretations that do not always represent the actual array of options and possibilities provided by Mālikī legal manuals. Meanwhile, in the above mentioned countries, the involved actors’ social predicament and right to speak in the name of the sharī`a largely derives from publicly exerting the role of custodians of the Mālikī legal tradition that flourished in the temporal and spatial context on which most of Delfina’s work on Islamic legal doctrine and practice has focused.

In view of the political, legal and social developments at stake, Mālikī literature provides a specially interesting vantage point to look for clarification, illustration and inspiration regarding the need to accommodate change while maintaining the ethical ideal of the sharī`a.