Children of Islam: concepts of childhood in medieval Muslim society

AVNER GIL'ADI, Children of Islam: concepts of childhood in medieval Muslim society, St Antony's/Macmillan Series, Basingstoke and Oxford, Macmillan in association with St Antony's College, 1992, pp. xii, 176, £40.00 (0-333-55598-8). This volume is a collection of eight studies by the author on various aspects of the history of childhood in medieval Islamic society. A useful introduction surveys the extant Arabic source material for the history of childhood and considers its relation to similar literature in the Hellenistic tradition. Two essays on the new-born infant discuss a Damascene childrearing manual, the Tuhfat al-mawdad by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzilya (d. 751/1350), and consider the origins of the childhood rite of tahnilk, i.e. rubbing an infant's palate with chewed dates. In the area of child education Gil'adi assesses the views of the renowned theologian, jurist, and mystic al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) and the place of corporal punishment in medieval Islamic educational thought. In what is probably the most substantial part of the book, three studies provide close analyses of child mortality, the theme of parental steadfastness (sabr) in times of bereavement, and the difficult and controversial question of infanticide. The work as a whole is an Arabist's contribution to the social history of medieval Islam, but Gil'adi's wide reading in the history of childhood in the Graeco-Roman world of classical and late antiquity, as well as in medieval and early modern Europe, enables him to offer many cross-cultural observations and lends his studies an important interdisciplinary dimension. The author stresses that his book comprises a series of separate studies rather than a history of childhood in medieval Islam, but several significant themes do seem to be pursued throughout the work. The first of these is the medieval Islamic view of childhood as a unique period in an individual's life, one posing its own special problems and concerns. Among Muslims it was universally conceded that the care of infants and small children required special understanding and treatment; and from Arabic literature generally, and treatises in obstetrics and paediatrics in particular, it emerges that the hygienic, pathological, therapeutic, and educational issues raised in connection with infants and children were all regarded as specific to them, as opposed to adults. There was also a fully developed Arabic vocabulary for children and for a broad range of issues and problems specific to childhood. This of course stands in striking contrast to the views of Philippe Aries and his theory that in Europe childhood was not "discovered" until fairly recent times. As Gil'adi observes on several occasions, the ways in which medieval Muslims conceptualized childhood can in part be traced to Hellenistic thinking; he holds back from pursuing the argument further, but the implication of his conclusions with respect to Islamic society is clearly that medieval and early modern European views of childhood are unlikely to have been so ambiguous (much less non-existent) when Hellenistic and Islamic views, known in Europe through Latin translations, were sharply defined and pursued in depth. A second theme is the complex and ambivalent ways in which medieval Islamic society viewed and reacted to children and childhood. Some stressed the innocence of childhood and adopted a fairly permissive attitude toward the young, while others were more restrictive, pointing out that unless taught and disciplined to control his desires, a child could easily go astray. While evidence for harsh corporal punishment and occasional infanticide suggests what in modern parlance would be "negative" concepts of childhood, this is far outweighed by material demonstrating that adults were profoundly concerned for the welfare of children and developed deep personal and emotional bonds with them: parents fretted over contradictory choices in infant care, delighted in their child's first smile and first steps, worried over their own role in child development and education, encouraged play and childhood games, grieved enormously if a child died, and were devastated by the sudden reappearance of a forgotten favourite toy of a deceased child. Overall, parents, teachers, physicians, and others held themselves responsible for the eventual integration of children into adult society, but then, as now, disagreed on how this could best be accomplished. Here a sharp contrast to Aries' "thesis of indifference" is to be observed, and once again one suspects that the discrepancy has to do not with distinctions between medieval European and Middle Eastern societies, but rather with the problematic views of Aries and his disciples.