Orphans of Islam Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption

Abstract

The question of adoption has been largely overlooked in studies of the Muslim world given that Islam officially prohibits it on potent religious alibis. Considering such a practice from an ethnographic perspective, and not exclusively a legalistic one, opens up new dimensions in the study of family and kinship in the Muslim world. Yet, such a practice is predicated on the existence of children to be adopted as 'raw material' in the first place. And while historically there have been, and still continue to be, various intra-family exchanges of children outside legal frames and the practice of Islamic tutelage, kafala, the Muslim world, as elsewhere, is experiencing the problem of abandoned children as a by-product of deep social permutations.