Daniel Drennan. Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness. Volume 24, Issue 1, 2015.
Introduction
Islamophobia is posited as a political and cultural reality (Alam, 2006; Geisser, 2003; Hagopian, 2004; Kumar, 2012). This, despite attempts to delimit its manifestation (Lane, 2012), or to dismiss it as a political “correctness” (Schanzer, 2013). Its historical analysis focuses on cultural and political derivations that lead up to Islamophobic manifestations. For example, France’s history of colonialism in the Muslim realm led to resistance in, and immigration from, its former colonies. Previous colonialist tropes segued into ensuing reactions against Islam. The United States’ history of anti-Muslim belligerence extending back to the Barbary Coast Wars provides another example.
As such, it is a political weapon put toward neocolonialist and imperialist ends. It is based in an evolution of Orientalism (Dabashi, 2008b; Said, 1979, 1994, 1997). It views the Muslim as an “Other” which, via reflection and negation, defines its originating antithesis. This binary indicates the categorizing function of its bourgeois origins. The resulting faulty synecdoches evoke conflicting desires to consume and destroy. These are elsewhere applied socially and culturally in an effort to distance valid from invalid humanity (Dabashi, 2008a, p. 293; Williams, 1978, pp. 180–185, 2001).
The construction of such binaries is tied to the demands of global capital and the post-World War II rise of American empire. It echoes a list of justifications for oppression based in perceived differences of race, class, ethnic origin, religious or political affiliation, and gender. These are put to similar purposes both domestically and abroad. To further clarify this definition:
Islamophobia is not a political ideology in itself nor is it an isolated dogma just as Islam itself is not a political ideology. Islamophobia does not have a platform or even a political vision. Islamophobia is something more substantive, abstract, sustained, ingrained and prevalent. This book contends that Islamophobia is an ideological formation…[which] is created by a culture that deploys particular tropes, analyses and beliefs, as facts upon which governmental policies and social practices are framed. (Sheehi, 2011, p. 6)
These “particular tropes” include readily comprehended concepts such as the “oppressed veiled woman.” They becomes the excuse and justification for policies and practices used to “modernize” countries so targeted. Adoption, perceived as humanitarian action and undergirded by such Islamophobia, likewise finds itself a dangerous and focused weapon used against communities, families, and children.
Displacement, dispossession, and disinheritance
This onslaught comes at a particular juncture. It coincides with the rise of local and diaspora Muslim bourgeois classes eager to expand their families. This expansion is based on foreign models, often eschewing local traditions and modes (Courbage & Todd, 2007). In terms of adoption, it follows the closing of other source countries after having served similar class interests. It coincides with revolutionary actions in Arab and Muslim lands, against which Islamophobia becomes a counter-revolutionary weapon of choice.
This complex intertwining of economics, politics, religion, and family with adoption practice requires deconstruction on a variety of levels. First, in terms of how familial practice maps onto strategies of capitalist domination. Such dominance necessitates a universal emphasis on individualism and the nuclear family. Second, in terms of the historical functions of adoption, and how these tie into attempts to restructure society. These functions delineate the conceptual transition of adoption from economic and political dispossession to family creation.
The grounding of narrative in and the bestowal of validity via a dominant mode or discourse is a third level. Such validation ignores the narratives of those who are not fully incorporated within society: the displaced, dispossessed, and disinherited. It points up the global shift from former labels of “East and West” or “First and Third World” to one acknowledging a globalized bourgeois cosmopolitan class: the polis (Amin, 1980, 2009; Drennan, 2009, pp. 2–3). This class maintains sovereignty, as compared to those without such agency: the zoë (Agamben, 1998).
In the era of national liberation movements, this was posited in terms of Frantz Fanon’s “damnés de la terre” [wretched of the Earth]. More recently, the Occupy Movements spoke of the “one percent” versus the “99 percent.” The choice here to use the terms “polis” and “zoë” calls attention to the inability of post-modern and libertarian discourses to deliver revolutionary praxis. It also elucidates the undemocratic Greek roots of status quo notions of bourgeois “Western” liberalism. As such, the recasting of these terms is co-conspiratorial in keeping in place the power differential of this false binary. Their use is pejorative, yet of great import in terms of clarifying this inherent preponderance.
The fourth level regards the misuse of terms, concepts, and postulations within the Bible and the Quran. This is similarly accomplished via a disempowering Orientalist and class-based lens. This view literally and reductively conceives of the “orphan” in limbo; a lone, contextless child. A more expansive idea of the orphan, representative of the weakest member of society, is lost in translation. The now individualized entity is then “saved” via adoption at the expense of her family, community, and originating place.
Family, nation-state, and children as property
This paper categorizes adoption with similar extirpating practices: slavery, gentrification, immigration, land occupation, apartheid, enforced statelessness, etc. It acknowledges the analogs of adoption that trade similarly in human flesh or genetic material: gamete donation, surrogacy, organ and human trafficking, etc. A bourgeois exaltation positively inverts these formerly negative concepts. This is postulated, for one example, by the post-modern and neo-liberal redefinitions of terms such as “nomad,” “hybrid,” “border-crosser,” etc.
This paper further advocates that the family unit represents society as a whole (Engels, 2011; Todd, 2005). It challenges the notion that adoptive parents have will outside of their class trajectory. As regards adoption, it maintains that property-based conceptions of “fallow land” conflate with those of “parentless waifs.” In this view, land use (or value of a child) is based on potential value within a capitalist system. For example, a farmhouse outside of creeping suburbia decreases in property value qua farmhouse on such “misused” land. This obtains regardless of any non-pecuniary “value” of the local farm. “Orphans” are likewise given value based purely on their potential post-adoption.
The industry of adoption accedes to such precepts, with primacy placed on flow and exchange of human capital. The perceived expense of maintaining familial integrity is considered less worthwhile, and is given less incentive, than the tactical disruption of community. This, in spite of the greater social or cultural value of children remaining in place, as seen from their perspective as well as that of their families and communities.
A reclaiming of children and place
“Western”-style adoption in the Muslim world is advanced as universal. It is promoted within countries labeled as “moderate” by this self-same “West.” This moniker of political and economic approval comes at great social cost. It institutes the oppression of people, the plunder of resources, and the opening up of economies to outside interference. For over a century, adoption has ridden at the forefront of such intervention in local communities and cultures.
This examination reflects a personal ijtihad: the endeavor of a Muslim to interpret the Quran without necessarily referring to previous exegeses. It acknowledges the voiceless children, families, and communities whose treatment ultimately defines the societies they exist within. Their destinies are instead shaped by economic and political forces of adopting classes and the nation-states they embody. The ensuing attacks on Islam need be countered with a critique of this dominant model (Shari‘ati, 1979, 1980). At this point, the historical function of adoption demands further elaboration.
Reframing adoption
To connect case studies with their precursors requires an examination of the political, economic, and religio-societal bases of current adoption practice. The historic derivations listed here carry forward and are manifested in such practice (Carp, 2002; Herman, 2002, p. 341; Marre & Briggs, 2009). Adoption mythologies countervail with efforts to deny the practice’s unbecoming origins. One such myth is that of adoptive parent will and agency. The desires and actions of prospective adoptive parents fit into and are formed by the foreign policy goals of incorporating nation-states. They further enact and enforce them:
It is misleading to conceptualize the needs and concerns of prospective parents as being somehow outside of or separate from the needs and concerns of the nation. Individuals who adopt from abroad do so within a particular domestic/international/political context. Their needs and desires are socially constructed and emerge out of the same domestic/international/political and economic context as the policies that formally address national needs and concerns. (Lovelock, 2000, p. 910)
This encodes and maintains the preservation of their class status as economic stakeholders. This focus on adoptive familial context is echoed when referring to adoption tangentially:
This representation of the Cold War as a sentimental project of family formation served a doubly hegemonic function. These families created an avenue through which Americans excluded from other discourses of nationhood could find ways to identify with the nation as it undertook its world-ordering projects of containing communism and expanding American influence. (Klein, 2003, p. 159)
The class-based divide separating those given political embodiment and those not is equally acknowledged by supporters of international adoption:
It can be viewed as the ultimate in the kind of exploitation inherent in every adoption, namely the taking by the rich and powerful of the children born to the poor and powerless. It tends to involve the adoption by the privileged classes in the industrialized nations of the children of the least privileged groups in the poorest nations, the adoption by whites of black- and brown-skinned children from various Third World nations, and the separation of children not only from their birthparents, but from their racial, cultural, and national communities as well. (Bertholet, 1993, p. 90)
Thus adoption’s historical shift to a method of family creation chronologically aligns with the rise of the U.S. as an imperial power in the years following World War II. It echoes other divisive migrations of that time period, most notably “white flight” and suburbanization. A list of adoption’s political and economic derivations will further situate the Islamophobic manifestations to follow.
Adopting “orphans,” the byproduct of war
The fostering of war orphans is a recurrent trope within American history. This was witnessed during World Wars I and II; the mediation of the atomic aftermath in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Korean and Viet Nam Wars; the “dirty wars” of the Caribbean, Central, and South America; the vestigial Cold War; and currently the direct and proxy “wars against terrorism” in South Asia. Adoption thus developed as a postwar public-relations effort. This has since evolved. Targeted adoption, as sponsored by supporters of Children in Families First (CHIFF) for example, has become an active portent of war, economic or political. This interventionist worldview also applies to natural and man-made disasters (Klein, 2008).
Hiring “orphans,” labor use, and indentured servitude
The rise of a suburban middle class and its role as an engine of capital in the U.S. postwar economy shifted the representation of children and the notion of childhood. The exploitation of minors within industrial and agricultural contexts provided an acquiescent workforce (Abramitzky & Braggion, 2006; p. 892). This colonial-era servitude was not a first recourse. It was instead a last resort after locally based kinship networks, parish poor relief, or familial estate relief failed to support a child. It was not a remedy, but was aimed at the destitute (Grubb, 1992).
Removing “orphans” from their Indigenous roots
Indigenous peoples in Anglo-Saxon settler-colonies were not spared similar adoption practices. They were in various ways defined as “child-like creatures in constant need of the paternal care of the government,” who would “gradually abandon their…barbaric behavior and adopt civilization” (Titley, 1992, p. 36). The goal was an eradication of culture, language, history, and memory, as well as displacement from the land (Johnston, 1983; Crichlow, 2002). Today, converted indigens fighting to end the Indian Child Welfare Act in the U.S. represent the logical conclusion of these efforts. These presage the Muslim advocates of adoption described in later case studies.
Exporting “orphans” to populate colonies
In an effort to maintain favorable population balances, the poor were used to populate British colonies as well as the French metropole. The exportation of British “Home Children” ended in the 1970s. The French practice of populating its rural areas from its former colonies was terminated in the 1980s. Similar efforts directed at Southwest Asian and African Jewry to populate Palestine provide another example (Demick, 1997). The U.S. domestically mimicked this practice with its Orphan Trains. These took children from eastern seaboard cities and transferred them to parts of the country in need of agricultural labor.
Secreting “orphans” away from their illegitimate origins
The Baby-Scoop Era defines the years during which Anglo-Saxon countries hid the shame of unwanted pregnancies via adoption. From 1940–1970 upwards of 1.5 million mothers were forced to relinquish children in the U.S., 400,000 in Canada (Fessler, 2007). The psychiatric reference to such women as “not-mothers” is precursory to the occlusion of original mothers within adoption mythology. The practices of the Magdalene Sisters and their laundry services in Ireland overlap here. The “shame” of illegitimate children allowed for their removal while their mothers provided slave labor.
“Orphans” as perfectable citizens
The outright purchase or trafficking of children reflects adoption unfettered by ethical or moral constraints or concerns (Balcom, 2011). Historically speaking, this exists within overtly nationalist and fascist nation-states (Clay, 1995; Moll, 2012). This is still mediated as a positive virtue of ideologies such as Zionism:
[Frederick] Hertz says that Israeli same-sex couples view child-rearing and surrogacy as a ‘queer contribution to the building of the Jewish state.’ Driving this point home, Hertz told the ‘Out in the Bay’ podcast in July 2012 that Israeli Jewish gay activists see surrogacy for same-sex couples as important for ‘maintaining the demographic advantage over non-Jews’. (Doherty, 2013)
Adoption (and its analogs) increase the amount of “perfected citizens” while “cleansing” the country of the politically or economically undesirable. This fascist perfection of economic and political models finds resonance in the evolution of adoption practices.
The mythologies of adoption
The institution and practice of adoption reflects societally structural mindsets concerning children, property (Maillard, 2012), kinship, lineage, identity, as well as notions of individuality and self. It is incentivized by economic and political exigencies. Nation-states at war, whether economic or political, target alternatives seen as systemically competitive, or which differ or resist. A growing lexicon describes this reality: humanitarian imperialism, the targeting of community-based cultures via market pressures, and the destructive nature of NGOs (Bricmont, 2006; Elyachar, 2005; INCITE!, 2007).
As opposed to a beneficent act, adoption’s very presence marks the failure of a society to care for those in need. The expansion of individualized, nuclear family-based capitalism now manifests itself by targeting the resistant parts of the Muslim world. This targeting reflects not a concern for children, but a desire for their generational assimilation or destruction. The comprador classes within said countries implement these imperial projects, and act locally as their agents. To understand this synergy, aspects of Islamophobic adoption mediation need be further analyzed.
Case studies: an escalation of tone and perfection of intent
The analysis of Islamophobic adoption mediation is based on Islam’s perception as an alien mix of religion, politics, mores, cultural modes, etc. This worldview is manifested by a variety of repeated tropes. Its Muslim advocates reflect idealized spokespeople. They erroneously conflate their class with their community in acts of individualizing exaltation. They are historically referenced as kowtowers, compradors, Uncle Toms, house slaves, colonized minds, etc. (Dabashi, 2011). This is illustrated by the following non-exhaustive list of case studies.
Logan from Lebanon
Israel’s war on Lebanon in July, 2006 gives us a first example of such mediation. Similar to the Viet Nam War’s Operation Babylift, this mediation centered on the human-interest story of a “saved child.” “Logan” was adopted to the U.S. by the Gabriel family (the Anglicized form of Al-Jibril, or Al-Gebrayel) via visas provided by intervening legislators (Harmacinski, 2006). This expedited exit stood in contrast to the wait imposed on many wishing to evacuate. This wait was due to perceived degrees of “American-ness.” This hierarchy – of genealogy, jus soli, marriage, and naturalization – can be framed as follows:
The relationship of Anglo-Saxons to the world is a shifting one. They have in their heads an anthropological border that distances them from universalists and brings them closer to categorizers, but this border moves, in the sense of its extension or its retraction. There’s us and there are others; among the others are some like us and others who are different. Among those who are different, some may be classified as similar. Among the similar, certain may be classified as different still. But there is always a limit separating the complete human being from the Other: “There is someplace where you must draw the line.”[emphasis, in English, in original; translation mine] (Todd, 2004, p. 152)
This flexible border of a binary categorization allowed for Logan’s foreign welcome. His mediation overlooked 500-plus children killed in little over a month, a third of the total civilian deaths. The Gabriels represented positive Americanized versions of their abandoned compatriots. Safe haven is thus preferentially provided to those who relinquish former status and place.
Copt adoption in Egypt
Class-identified mediation often shifts from the child to the adoptive parents, deemed as equally requiring “salvation.” For example, in 2009 a Copt couple was convicted of trafficking children from Egypt. It is not denied that such trafficking exists in Muslim-majority countries. However, it is the surprise of an actual conviction that counts in this news story. Islam bears the burden of opprobrium. The mediation describes adoption in Egypt as “snarled in religious tradition.” It demands that Egypt “modernize” itself due to its “uncaring” behavior toward infants (Michael, 2009). These would-be parents in turn were represented as benefactors breaking the rules in order to save “their” children.
Adoption middlemen in Morocco
Beyond prospective adoptive caretakers are NGOs acting as their middlemen. This humanitarian incursion is often a front for proselytizing. This was the case for members of a Christian NGO subsequently deported. The mediation proclaims their victim status, and the plight of the children:
‘The way it was done has been traumatizing for the children: They have been abandoned a second time,’ said Wald. ‘It was a shameful act on the part of the Moroccan authorities. What they’re saying is that the perceived threat from Christianity trumps the welfare of these children’. (van Langendonck, 2010)
Insinuated is the inability of Morocco to care for its children. Adoption is mythologized as the opposite of abandonment, and synonymous with child welfare.
Orphans from Iraq
In countries where no foreign adoption agency incursions are allowed, the Islamophobic tone changes. This article defines Iraqi orphans as being barred from adoption by outdated Muslim practice:
Helene Lauffer knew that Muslim children—orphaned, displaced, neglected—needed homes in the United States. She knew that American Muslim families wanted to take them in. [Emphasis mine] (Zoll, 2011)
This inversion equates “Muslim children” as “inherently neglected.” The American role in the destruction of potential source countries goes unmentioned (Mahajan, 2001). Worthiness is given to “American Muslim families” who have arrived economically and politically speaking. Ms. Lauffer’s role as director of an adoption agency, Spence-Chapin, is sidelined. Also elided is her citation of a group of Muslim women scholars/adoption advocates, the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality. Their assigned prominence as valid voices within the status quo defines the norm from which a targeted Islam is seen to deviate.
Conversion of adoptive parents
In stark contrast to these calls for adoptive Muslim parents is the inversion in which parents cannot be fathomed as being Muslim at all. The illogical conclusion is that “valid” parents must convert prior to the adoption of children from Morocco:
There is a very disturbing situation going on with International Adoption in Islamic countries. In order to adopt, you must convert to Islam….This is supremacist and outrageous. (Thacker, 2011)
Adoptive parents are in control of this power differential. Ignored are private orphanages, predominantly Christian, which equally require that prospective caregivers be of a particular faith.
Orphans as suicide bombers
A perfection of the mediated story shifts from newsbrief to editorial. An article in the Daily Beast implied that the orphaned children of Pakistan were being recruited by Al-Qaeda as suicide bombers. The article proposed an undoing of the “antiquated, shortsighted, and regressive stricture that makes adoption illegal [within Islam]:”
This week, Islamic society moved into the 21st century with a slick little brochure by a New York-based advocacy group of Muslim women scholars called the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality. (Nomani, 2012)
Insinuated is local backwardness, with reference made to the aforementioned group of women scholars. The historical American support of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere is simply overlooked.
Kafala adoption from Morocco
This class-similar advocacy comes full circle in the marketing of kafala adoption. Based in Morocco, this program finds Muslim “guardians” for Moroccan children in a subvention of Islamic tenets:
Adoptions are conducted via a Moroccan court process known as kafala (similar to guardianship) and children will subsequently be re-adopted in the U.S. courts after homecoming. [emphasis mine] (Spence-Chapin, 2012)
The term “homecoming” implies that such children are not currently in their proper or destined place. Kafala comes from a consonantal root meaning “to feed, support, provide for.” Bending to economic necessity, it has come to mean the legal bonding of an indentured servant. Adopted children are thus linked to vast migrant populations currently working in their places of origin.
The defined role of women and children
The women cited above collude with imperialist agents. They are given greater importance and value than women in the local populations they target. The desire to bring “change” to their homelands or communities from the outside defines the purpose of Islamophobia presented here:
The issue of gender has been a key prong in the strategic trident to unify bi-partisan and mass support for US interventionism in the Muslim world. Both Arabic and English media have been flooded by a slew of contrived, opportunistic, and charlatan Muslim and Arab women, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, and Brigitte Gabriel, advancing Western-centric attacks on Islam. (Sheehi, 2011, p. 159)
These agents exemplify an inability to make common cause with women outside of their lived or perceived class status. This inherent and yet masked misogyny is projected onto an Islam seen as without feminist agency (Ahmed, 1993; Mernissi, 1996; Wadud, 1999). This misogyny further exalts one class of women (adoptive mothers) over another (original mothers) in a codependent, exclusionary, and patriarchal binary. This mirrors the actions of women champions of “Western” adoption practice, such as Alice Chapin, Georgia Tann, and Pearl S. Buck.
Clash of civilizations
In the targeted populations of Muslim-majority countries, we see a burgeoning imitation of this “Western” adoption practice. Targeted groups – minories, refugees, disempowered communities, nomadic peoples, etc. – reveal overlapping levels of dispossession, displacement, and disinheritance. As stated to Arthur Blok in The Children of the Cedars: “You [adoptees] are from the South (poor and marginalized Shi‘a and Christian populations) and Palestine (via the occupied country or the refugee camps)” (Khodr, 2009). Such groups to varying degrees often exist outside of valid political status within their enveloping nation-states.
Regulations concerning the political status of adopted children are equally in flux. They bend to pressure from adopting countries as well as international treaties and agreements. The law acts outside of local familial definitions, and processes have streamlined with time. For example, falsification of names gave way to registration of adoptees under adoptive family names. This has advanced to the pre-birth hospital registration of an original mother in the adoptive mother’s name. Children are often converted to the target/adoptive religion. The adoptee’s family and community are further obliterated by this local legal adaptation of foreign laws and practices.
Overlooked resistance
The case studies reveal two major points. First, a timeline of tactical escalation of mediated Islamophobia as concerns adoption. Media reports yield to preemptive story placement. This seeming journalism in turn cedes to editorializing outside of on-the-ground reality. Agencies recycle these tropes and use Islam as well as Muslims to redefine and streamline their practice.
Second, a willful ignorance of local resistance to such adoption (and other efforts that target local children.) In the case of the July War on Lebanon in 2006, local mediation expressed a different take than foreign media. For one example, a banner hung from an overpass in downtown Beirut painted Condoleezza Rice as a “butcher of children” and schoolmarm to the prime minister.
For another, the populations of the French départments outre-mers et territoires outre-mers (DOM-TOM) activated against the abduction of their youth for a French metropole-based work force. They understood the removal of children to be a disruption of local liberation movements (Maestrati, 2007). The French government only recently apologized for this practice that spanned decades.
Muslim adoptees are notably speaking out. One such adoptee, known as YÀZ, speaks of his faith as being his saving grace: “Happily I have my faith/And thus avoided the worst, it allowed me to hang on…” (YÀZ, 2011). Islam becomes a refuge, and faith a resistant act. There are many examples of a resistant zoë beyond the willful perception of the polis. These are not picked up in the mainstream media (Drennan, 2014).
Alternative models
The default to pro-adoption Muslim voices can likewise be readily documented. A shift here would focus on the work of those advocating for alternative options for, and communal care of, vulnerable children. Sayyed Mohammad Fadlallah in Lebanon, for example, started his orphanage system in reaction to the disappearance of children from the local community. He stated: “We are an Islamic institution but not solely for Muslims….We are not representatives of any political ideology or party, it’s about these kids and their needs.” (Ammouri, 2007; El-Ghoul, 2005).
Many organizations similarly advocate for the displaced and the dispossessed. They attempt to maintain living links between children and their origins. These grassroots efforts contradict dominant mythologies concerning adoption. Furthermore, they correct the misrepresentations of Islamophobic discourse. They attempt to undo local damage wrought economically and politically by its purveyors. One of the greatest ironies of Islamophobia is this projection onto Islam of the documented failures of “Western” capitalist society.
Readings of the Quran resonate with such local actions. Its invocations concerning orphans represent them as the most vulnerable members of society. It stipulates that children remain within, and be taken care of, by their community. It demands that their filiation rest intact, and that the community preserve their property, until they should be of age to make use of it. At this point the willful misinterpretation of the Quran in this regard will be further explored.
“Adoption” and the Quran
The discussion of reductive versus expansive views of the Quran is greater than this paper allows. It cannot encompass the hadith literatures, the schools of jurisprudence, the existing Quranic exegeses, or the lived realities of Muslim communities around the world. All of these nonetheless expand upon our readings on adoption within Islam, and need be given due consideration (Bargach, 2002).
The question “how is the Quran misread in terms of the translated term ‘adoption’?” requires its examination as a whole. The extraction of a single ayat or surat from the Quran is not considered valid exegetical practice. Such quotations nonetheless end up in the marketing materials of adoption agents promoting adoption from Muslim-majority countries. These do not do justice to the greater themes of the Quran, invoked multiple times as leitmotifs therein.
To further expound is the critical failure of accusations that the Quran “bans” adoption, or that adoption “does not exist” in Islamic societies. Such interpretation derives from a false and imposed binary. A more nuanced critique would focus on the following criteria: the difference between what is allowed from what is actually practiced, whether such expressed allowances correlate with or contradict said practices, whether this is considered internally hypocritical or dissonant, and what if any frictions this disparity causes in a given society as viewed from within.
A Venn diagram dividing expressed proscriptions from allowances concerning child-rearing, guardianship, foster care, and adoption serves as an illustration. The diagram’s outsets form the binary expression of these, shaped by class-based incentives and invocations of the polis. The overlapping subset reveals the muddled lived experience legitimate to the zoë. Possible spectra run from utopian (completely overlapping) to dystopian (completely binary). Extreme differences between the two are not evocative of a contradiction. They evoke instead differing levels of political embodiment and, by extension, lived reality. This actively morphs and changes with time and context.
Linguistics and the Quran
Beyond the use, role, and resonance of the Quran in the quotidian of Muslims’ lives is its situation within the Arabic language. To understand is the differences among spoken Arabic dialects, Modern Standard Arabic as used by print and broadcast media, as well as the literary and Quranic forms. An all-encompassing examination of language, including the active realm of oral and written traditions, gives us insight into the conceptual use of the terms that reference adoption. The historical bases for such practice are revealed by the class-based, national, regional, and cultural markers of Arabic speakers (Lecercle, 2009).
Differences in this regard are as telling as similarities. The Levantine dialect maintains roots of Syriac- and Aramaic-derived word-concepts. As Semitic tongues foundational to the Bible, this current use provides historical insight. Such languages “shadow” each other. For example, the Amharic consonantal root for “writing” is the basis for words in Arabic meaning “press” and “journalist.” In this way a conceptual sense of the Bible’s Semitic-language origins can be deduced. The Bible we know today is a transcribed and translated document, yet its linguistic, geographic, and cultural origins need resonate with those of the Quran.
Terms for adoption
In standardized Arabic, the term mutabanna means “adopted” or “adoptee.” Its consonantal root primarily means “to embrace,” “to espouse,” “to take up.” This word has currency within a certain class which lives closer to a globalized Anglo-Saxon model than the greater population. As similarly used by the press, the term is a conceptual back-formation from English or French. It evokes a wholly separate metaphoric use: “to start using [something],” as in “cell-phone adoption.”
More popularly or commonly understood are the words for orphan or foundling (yatīm, laqīT) and orphanage (dar al-’aytām). The role of the orphanage differs according to religious sect. “Adopted” thus becomes a foreign notion within certain communities. The popular language reveals a cultural and bourgeoisie-derived stigma concerning orphans, and a lingering notion of shame of the fatherless child. At the same time, proverbs make ready reference to the validity of foster care (Freyha, 1974; p. 112). They also denote the equivalence of one’s connection to place as well as family.
Quranic concepts of adoption
Mutabanna, most notably, is not used to mean “adopted” in the Quran. There are, in fact, two separate terms both translated as “adoption.” The first, ad‘iya’a, comes from a root meaning “to be claimed by” or “advocated for,” as a townsperson is claimed socially by her town. This lends greater sense when read in context:
God did not place two hearts inside a man’s chest. God has not made the wives you cast out by saying “You are to me like my mother’s back” to be truly your mothers, nor has He made your adopted children to be like your true children. This is merely something you utter with your mouths, but God speaks the truth and guides to the right path. So call them by their fathers’ names: this is more fair with God. If you do not know who their fathers are, then they are your brothers in faith or your clients. But no blame attaches to you if you make a mistake—save only in what your hearts premeditate. God is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each. —The Confederate Troops 33:4–5 (All translations: Khalidi, 2008)
Returning to our Venn diagram, the [falsely] familial is strictly forbidden and yet tolerated. It is admonished in a legal and social sense and yet allowed in an emotional and communal sense. This positive notion of the term is the clearest statement concerning such children in the Quran (Asad, 1980, pp. 717–718; Bargach, 2002, pp. 48–49).
The second term found in the Quran translated as “adopted” is itakhadha which means “taken in,” as found in the story of Joseph:
The man who bought him, from Egypt, said to his wife: “Treat him hospitably, for he might be of use to us, or else we might adopt him as a son. —Joseph 12:21
“Son” in the familial sense is secondary to the acquisition of a “useful” boy servant. To this point, Joseph’s “adoption” is described in stark economic terms. He was “hidden as a merchandise” and then “sold for a paltry sum” as he was “given no value.” This negative notion of the term most closely maps onto Anglo-Saxon adoption practice. Yet both of these terms are ascribed linguistic equivalence in translation. This reflects not their conceptual similarity, but rather the bias of the target language.
Quranic narratives of adoption
Those claimed to having been “adopted” in both the Bible and Quran, most notably Joseph as mentioned, but also Moses, pose a counter-argument to literal readings of these Books. In narrative terms, both were adopted against their parents’ wishes. Their removal caused great anguish to their families. The return to “source” was the anticipated denouement of their journeys. Finally, their true calling began upon repatriation to rightful place, status, and people.
This is particularly telling in the Quranic story of Joseph, who is sold to and “taken in” by first a wealthy lord and then the king. Given Joseph’s eventual reunion, his servitude and rise to power are temporary and invalid situations. This examination of class difference contrasts with “Western” adoption mythologies that premise a “better life” for adopted children.
The Quranic story of Moses is more pointed. Moses was taken in by those who were his enemy, and the enemy of his people. His narrative includes wet-nursing by his own mother:
That was when your sister went about saying: “Shall I point out to you one who will take charge of him?” We then returned you to your mother so that she may be of good cheer and not sorrow. —Ta’ Ha’, 20:40
Familial reference is made to his biological sister, and importance ascribed to his mother and her loss. Such binding references remain missing from the “Western” notions of the “triad,” from amended birth certificates, from falsified identifying information, etc.
Quranic themes that counter adoption
Separate from more straightforward narrative passages are references that foreground primary themes within the Quran. Zacharieh, for example, supplicates for an heir from within the community, more trustworthy than his own kin. The response is the announcement of a child, although he is aged and his wife is barren. A class-based reading imputes an implicit “right” to children. On the contrary, this correction reiterates the prominence of the familial bond denied by Zacharieh. The greater theme elaborates an avoidance of social chaos caused by such overstepping.
Muslim advocates of adoption pick and choose passages that justify their desires. This reflects the actions of evangelical Christians, also criticized for such misinterpretations (Joyce, 2013; Smolin, 2012). The greater themes of the Quran, listed out, further provide rebuttal to their efforts. Exegetic efforts concerning adoption must expand from these tropes. Furthermore, they must necessarily eschew a bourgeois interpretive lens.
Genealogy: Similar to the Bible, importance is placed on familial lineage, via descriptions of genealogical descent. This vertical stemming is balanced with calls to horizontal branching and outreach in terms of brotherhood/sisterhood, care for neighbors and strangers. To note in particular is the invocation to recognize a child with unknown lineage as a “brother in faith” and a dependent.
The abjuring of self-indulgence: Wealth and children are dismissed as passing fancies of this realm. Greater value is given to the abjuring of self-indulgence, in favor of good deeds and the consideration of one’s community.
Role for the childless: Reference is made to God’s knowledge of who has children and who is without, as well as who is capable of bearing children and who cannot. This denotes a non-punishing equivalence of such groupings, and a place within the community for those without children.
Connection to family and place: Understood as a God-derived punishment, the willed removal from family or place is an ultimate act of self-inflicted alienation. This, the result of one’s own sin, accounts for the son of Noah drowned, the wife of Lot left behind, the exile of the Israelites in Egypt, Benjamin’s “punishment” to serve the king, etc. In this light, unwilled familial divisions cannot be misconstrued as acts of beneficence.
Stages of life: The Quran refers to the miracle of life in terms of stages: the mixing of sperm and egg, the ensuing creation of an embryo and fetus, the imbuing of this being with spirit, and the subsequent birth of a child. This is followed by the variety of life stages within Islamic tradition. This gives us an unbroken and unbreakable personal chain of existence that builds on familial and communal notions of genealogy going back (al-nasāb) and heritage/deeds sent forward (al-Hasāb).
The oppressed and the oppressor: Those considered weak within society (mustadhafīn) are contrasted with the arrogant, or the oppressors (mustakbirīn). This echoes our notion of polis and zoë, yet provides a more validly active description of their societally willed separation. It is similar to Biblical references, especially to the widow and orphan. One cannot therefore ignore the weak in order to uplift one from among them. The invocation remains to empower all; to provide justice for all.
Islamophobic ideas concerning adoption give us a false binary based nominally in religion. In fact, these incentives for adoption are economically established and politically contrived. An expansive reading of the Books currently used to justify adoption divulges the communal contract they exemplify linguistically and culturally speaking. Their more literal and capitalistic derivations have been warped by the economic and political systems with which they dovetail. For these texts in fact aspire to, and advocate for, a completely different fate and future for the vulnerable children of all societies. This begs the question of all those of good faith: Who, indeed, are the civilized?
Conclusion
Adoption practice stems historically from Calvinist and capitalist concepts of family and society. More recently, it has seen a revival within evangelical Christianity. In historic parallel, an equally literal and reductive Islamic tradition has signed onto the neo-liberal agenda. It currently views the use of adoption as a valid function thereof. Such positionings stipulate that practices condemned by the Quran are pre-Islamic, and have been left behind.
Quranic invocations against infanticide deserve further note in this regard. Repeated Quranic reference is made to this practice, which targeted female children. This can be compared historically with the “butter-box babies” of Nova Scotia, the mass graves of Tuam, Ireland, as well as what many adoptees can glean from visits to their originating institutions. A euthanizing role for orphanages has thus always existed. This goes largely unspoken. Such destruction of unwanted children was only later formalized via adoption into more palatable options.
All the same, these options still deny children any valid political embodiment. In contrast, the Quran spells out concepts that holistically and societally consider the well-being and rights of children. In this light, the attempts to equate Islam as backwards or uncivilized become hypocritical projections. The Quran situates adoption as a practice that inherently portends greater societal violences. This long-term view runs contrary to the shortsightedness that treats children as “fallow” and thus transferable property. The result is a willful negation of original family and community.
This holistic outlook focuses on the following precepts: a child’s rights and connections in terms of family and place; an expansion of family into the community; a move to true communal care; a rematriation (Deer Cloud, 2009) of the displaced, dispossessed, and disinherited; an examination beyond the unbalanced “triad;” an expansion of the communal narrative; as well as an active attempt to equalize disparities in societal structure. This outlook serves as a point of reevaluation of adoption practice, and this whether one identifies as Muslim or not.
For the societal fault lies not with the child, but with the child denied valid existence and place. To further exacerbate this denial via adoption is an even greater oppression, not a lessening of it. If there is truth in the avowed desire to “save the children,” then a differing point of view will not be seen as an obstacle. Nor will the children of targeted realms be considered as foreigners to be destroyed. Different perspectives serve instead as models to examine and expand upon. For children have unbreakable ties to their pasts as well as to their destinies. The policies, promotion, and practice of adoption deprive children of these ties, as well as their dignity, selfhood, and place.