Orphans of Islam

Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption in Morocco

By (author) Jamila Bargach

Not available to order

Publication date:

19 April 2002

Length of book:

310 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780742500266

Orphans of Islam portrays the abject lives and "excluded body" of abandoned and bastard children in contemporary Morocco, while critiquing the concept and practice of "adoption," which too often is considered a panacea. Through a close and historically grounded reading of legal, social, and cultural mechanisms of one predominantly Islamic country, Jamila Bargach shows how "the surplus bastard body" is created by mainstream society. Written in part from the perspectives of the children and single mothers, intermittently from the view of "adopting" families, and employing bastardy as a haunting and empowering motif with a potentially subversive edge, this ethnography is composed as an intricate, open-ended, and arabesque-like evocation of Moroccan society and its state institutions. It equally challenges received sociological and anthropological tropes and understandings of the Arab world.
This is a fine example of how meticulous ethnography of extraordinary power is 'found' in the course of fieldwork that is both rigorous and guided by profound personal connection. Bargach has caught Moroccan society in a revealing contradiction and produces an account from it that is both ethical and honorable.