Marriage — its ideology and associated practices — is the key to many societies around the world, not least in the Muslim Middle East. Not merely the central mechanism for social reproduction, marriage is also the main focus of social production. The choice of partners, the political circumstances behind a match, the negotiations between the two sides, the accumulation and exchange of the various customary gifts, the conduct and evaluation of the wedding ceremonies, the relations between affines and the eventual fruitfulness of the marriage — all these matters are the constant concern of all members of any community, so that any ethnographic account of culture or social relations in such a community that fails to recognize and examine the importance of marriage is necessarily incomplete.

In the Muslim Middle East, there is an additional problem for the investigator. The notorious seclusion and segregation of women has meant that the few recent studies of marriage are one-sided. Either they have adopted a ‘male’ perspective, treating marriage arrangements as a means whereby political and economic conflict and competition in the wider society are negotiated and managed, or they have concentrated more narrowly on the domestic aspects of marriage and its relation to the productive and reproductive activities of women.