Filiation/nasab and Family Values in Pre-modern Shiʿi Law

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore the various rules concerning familial relationships, particularly the rules around filiation/nasab in the classical Imami Shiʿi school of Islamic law. The Imami school shares many legal doctrines with the other Muslim legal schools, but it also has a number of distinctive legal doctrines. Here I outline these distinctive doctrines and discern a common pattern – namely that close kin family relations are particularly prized to the exclusion of more distant family relations, making the family unit (as understood in legal terms) smaller; also, there is a general suspicion of legal stratagems which create fictional filiation relationships. What mattered for Imami jurists was, on the whole, that the law reflect commonly accepted notions of the roles of parents and children. In the conclusion, I offer an interpretation of these particular doctrines, and propose a linkage between them and the fundamental notion of the family of the Prophet Muhammad and its authority, a founding element of Shiʿi doctrine.