Imtiaz Ahmad, Former Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
This classic work deals with aspects of family, kinship and marriage in Muslim communities in different parts of India. Each contribution included here is based on data collected by the authors through fieldwork in specific communities. Each contributor also seeks to describe and analyse the social institutions in terms of social practices rather than the formal laws of Islam. Some contributors do refer to the formal Islamic principles and try to examine the correspondence between them and the social practices and behaviour they found in the areas of their study. The Islamic rules relating to kinship and marriage are not their primary concern. They refer to them merely as analytic bases. Their primary concern is to provide an empirical profile of the structure and functioning of family, kinship and marriage in the communities about whom they write. The book fills a long-standing gap in our sociological knowledge about Muslims in India and would be valued both for the rich ethnographic accounts of particular Muslim communities and for the fresh light it throws on those aspects of Muslim kinship and marriage which have been a subject of much heated debate.
