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Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Alyssa Gabbay, "Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam"Â (I.B. Tauris, 2020)
Description: In this episode, we speak with Alyssa Gabbay about her recent new book Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima (I.B. Tauris, 2020). The book shows that contrary to assumptions about Islam’s patrilineal nature, there is in fact precedent in pre-modern Islamic history of Muslims' recognition of bilateral descent, or descent from both the mother and the father – though, of course, bilateral descent was by no means universally acknowledged.Although not the only example of this argument, Muhammad’s daughter Fatima is essential to the study because of her s...