Orphans of Islam

Orphans of Islam portrays the abject lives and "e;excluded body"e; of abandoned and bastard children in contemporary Morocco, while critiquing the concept and practice of "e;adoption,"e; which too often is considered a panacea. Through a close and historically grounded reading of legal, social, and cultural mechanisms of one predominantly Islamic country, Jamila Bargach shows how "e;the surplus bastard body"e; is created by mainstream society. Written in part from the perspectives of the children and single mothers, intermittently from the view of "e;adopting"e; families, and employing bastardy as a haunting and empowering motif with a potentially subversive edge, this ethnography is composed as an intricate, open-ended, and arabesque-like evocation of Moroccan society and its state institutions. It equally challenges received sociological and anthropological tropes and understandings of the Arab world.