Middle East, Culture.

The family is the oldest social institution in the world. Throughout history, the family has been the foundation of society, caring for its members during their lifetimes in the same way that modem nations care for their citizens. In fact, a nation or a state is often described as a large family, and a family is often described as a society in miniature. When the family is thriving, society supposedly thrives; when the family is declining, the society supposedly is also on the decline. But what does "family" mean? We tend to forget that it is a general term which means different things in different societies. In the West, "family" has come to be defined simply as "parents and their children" or a single parent and a child. In the Middle East, the Arabic word for family, ahl or ahila, is a more inclusive term and can be used to mean "relatives, family, wife, inhabitants; people, especially persons of a special group or place; members, followers; possessors." At its ultimate level, it is the urnrna, the family of believers in Islam.

  But however and wherever defined, the family is a human invention dealing with human needs, and its basic functions concern the survival and reproduction of the group. The Middle East is an area of great diversity, from Morocco on the Atlantic, across the southern Mediterranean to Turkey and south and east to Arabia and Pakistan. Ecology, dialect and language, economic position from rich to poor, divide the area, but its constants are the majority religion of Islam and the institution of the larger extended family unit. In the Middle East today, therefore, the issue of the family is not a narrow "people’s “issue, divorced from economic and political matters, as it tends to be in Western society. The issue of the family is a political and economic issue of fundamental importance, for the extended family remains not only the basic unit of social organization, but the focus of the social change currently in progress throughout the...