Introduction: Asymmetrical Dependencies and the Muslim Family

This introduction situates slavery at the heart of Muslim family history and argues that the two institutions must be analysed as structurally intertwined rather than conceptually distinct. While Islamic legal and literary sources devote sustained attention to enslaved individuals, scholarship on the medieval Muslim family has often marginalised or erased them. Conversely, slavery studies have tended to move away from family dynamics. Addressing this historiographical paradox, the introduction proposes a reconceptualisation of the Muslim family that fully integrates enslaved men and women as constitutive members of household formations .
By adopting a broad and historically sensitive definition of “family,” we move beyond a narrow nuclear model to encompass extended, co-residential, and household-based configurations that included kin, enslaved persons, freed persons, and other dependants. Drawing on comparative family history, we argue that family forms have always been fluid, shaped by economic structures, legal norms, gender regimes, and political transformations.
In Islamicate societies families were typically extended and organised around shared residence and subjection to a common legal and moral authority. At the same time, authority within the household was neither monolithic nor static; it was mediated by gender, legal status, origin, and economic position. Thus, family is treated not as a fixed biological unit but as a dynamic social formation structured by layered hierarchies and intersecting dependencies .

Conceptually, the introduction mobilises the framework of “strong asymmetrical dependency” to analyse slavery as a relational condition embedded in institutional contexts that limited the possibility of “exit” or effective “voice.” This lens enables the authors to capture both overt domination and more subtle forms of economic and emotional dependence operating within families. Intersectionality is central to this approach: legal capacity and social standing were contingent upon the interaction of multiple variables—freedom and enslavement, gender, religion, age, and lineage—whose relevance shifted according to context and legal act. Legal sources, in particular, reveal how these variables were hierarchically ordered and pragmatically negotiated in everyday life .

The introduction also outlines the structure of the volume, which spans from the eighth to the eighteenth century and from al-Andalus to the Crimean Khanate. The contributions are organised into four thematic sections: legal frameworks and domestic norms; female slaves in male-authored literature and discourses; slavery, religion, and foreignness; and slaves in rural and devotional contexts. Together, they demonstrate that enslaved individuals were not peripheral to family life but integral to its economic reproduction, affective bonds, religious negotiations, and legal configurations.