“When the Husband Converts but the Wife Desists”: Husband-Only Conversion and Legal Discourse in the Eighth/Fourteenth Century

Abstract

This article focuses on the importance that Islamic legal texts and prescriptive literature from the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries assign to the family, especially the mother, in forming religious identity. It approaches this question by analyzing the phenomenon of the non-converting family, or the family's retention of their Jewish or Christian religion after the father's conversion to Islam. The article describes and contextualizes instances in which the family did not convert along with the father against the background of seventh-/thirteenth- and eighth-/fourteenth-century Syria and Egypt. It summarizes some of the measures that were introduced to punish non-converting families of new Muslims and contrasts these with the rulings relating to conversion in an eighth/fourteenth-century legal compendium. The legal rulings focus on positive motivation to convert rather than punitive measures but reflect a similar concern to promote the conversion of the family as a whole. They also reflect a particular concern that the wife of the convert and mother of the household should convert, a feature which is related here to the influence that mothers are held to have exercised over the religious identity of the household.