Abstract
This thesis will demonstrate how prosopographical methods can be used to provide a
narrative of social change for the Quraysh tribe of Late Antiquity. By applying these
methods to records of their marriage behaviour, it will be shown that the pre-Islamic
Quraysh led a far more marginal existence than is widely thought, and that in the post-
Islamic period they were surprisingly flexible with regard to their marriage practices and
ideas on group membership.
The first three chapters focus on historiography and methodology. Chapter One
introduces the methodological preliminaries that lie at the heart of this research; these
concern the nature of the data, the manner in which it is extracted and the way it will be
structured within databases. Issues regarding the quality and reliability of the marital
records as preserved in the nasab (tr: genealogical) literary tradition are also discussed in
this section. Chapter Two provides a historiography of the nasab tradition, paying
particular attention to the nature of its emergence and the possible effects of social and
cultural contexts on the quality of the marriage data. This provides the groundwork for
Chapter Three which focuses more narrowly on the work from which most of our data
are extracted – the Nasab Quraysh of al-Zubayrī (d. 851).
The remaining five chapters outline how the data within the nasab tradition can be
analysed and incorporated into existing secondary scholarship. Chapters Four and Five
establish that the data show a rapid rise in concubinage at the same time as the Arab
military conquests of the seventh century. This has implications for our current consensus
on the nature of marriage and identity in the seventh and eighth centuries. Chapters Six
to Eight investigate the marriages made by the Quraysh to Arab women in the sixth to
eighth centuries, and will show how practice adapted to context.
To conclude, it will be argued that this investigation not only establishes the high quality
of the marriage data as preserved in the nasab tradition, but also the enormous potential
of prosopographical methods when applied to the study of early Islamic history.
Abstract…..............................................................................................................1
Contents.................................................................................................................2
List of maps and tables...........................................................................................4
Acknowledgements...............................................................................................8
Notes on citations and transliteration.....................................................................9
Introduction......................................................................................................................11
Part One – Data, methods and historiography..................................................................25
Chapter One: Methodology..................................................................................25
Chapter Two: Historiography of the nasab tradition...........................................60
Chapter Three: The Nasab Quraysh in context....................................................86
Part Two – Data analysis and application......................................................................109
Chapter Four: The statistical analysis of concubinage.......................................114
Chapter Five: Origins of Islamic concubinage...................................................136
Chapter Six: Marriage datasets...........................................................................159
Chapter Seven: Marriage in the late jāhiliyya and early Islam..........................186
Chapter Eight: Caliphal Umayyad marriage......................................................223
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................232
Appendix One – Hajīn marriage....................................................................................242
Appendix Two - Marriages of the brothers of Muʿāwiya and Marwān I......................248
Bibliography..................................................................................................................250
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