Workshop: Motherhood and Unfreedom

4. Juni 2025, von AAI Webmaster

On 4 June 2025, SCORE team member Alasdair took part in the workshop ‘Motherhood and Unfreedom in the Islamicate World, 700–1000’ at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam. The workshop was organised by Zahra Azhar and Leone Pecorini Goodall of the ERC Starting Grant project ‘Embodied Imamate’, led by Ed Hayes at Leiden University. The programme included contributions from scholars working in Egypt, Germany, Kuwait, the Netherlands and the UK. Papers drew on a variety of sources including historiography, papyri, inscriptions and court records, while topics ranged from female agency to elite identity to unfreedom in the afterlife. Alasdair’s contribution offered a methodological intervention focusing on the demographic significance of concubine-born sons, treating the early Islamic context in parallel with the late medieval Italy and Italian colonies across the Mediterranean, where similar legal practices emerged. His paper argued that the legitimation of concubine-born sons was a measure calculated to maximise male reproductive capacity and to promote the importance of patrilineal descent.