Orphans of Islam

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.

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.

Chapter 1 Notes on Transliteration and Transcription
Chapter 2 Preface and Acknowledgements
Part 3 Introduction(s): Object/Subject, Discipline/Argument
Part 4 I: Defining Moves: From Text to Script and From Script to Text
Chapter 5 1 Legal Throes: Genealogies and Debates of Kafala, Adoption, and Abandoned Children
Chapter 6 2 Counterpoints: The Idiom of Adoption between Theological Interpretation, the Rise of the Nation-State and the "Real"
Part 7 II: Rootless Lives and Bloodless Ties: Bastards, Secret Adoptions, and Some Other Cultural Dialectics
Chapter 8 3 Of Anthropology: Nature, Nurture, and Kinship
Chapter 9 4 Of Rituals: Names, Affiliation, and Identity
Chapter 10 5 Of Culture: Loci, Lore, and Stereotypes
Part 11 III: Nothing Above Family: To Reflect on Marginality
Chapter 12 6 News From the Art, Intellectual and Media Fronts: Reflections on and Representations of Marginality
Chapter 13 7 Social Work at Work: Or What Politics for What Help?
Chapter 14 8 Civil Society and Social Work: Or the Politics of What Help? (Continued)
Part 15 Postface
Chapter 16 Notes
Chapter 17 Index