Maksudyan, Nazan2021-05-152021-05-1520160002-87621937-5239https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.682https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12939/494Avner Giladi’s panoramic study Muslim Midwives: The Craft of Birthing in the Premodern Middle East opens by setting forth the views of midwifery presented by two authors of sharply contrasting sensibilities and approaches, the fifteenth-century historian and proto-sociologist Ibn Khaldūn and the dyspeptic fourteenth-century religious polemicist Ibn al-Ḥājj. Ibn Khaldūn’s unusually extensive and respectful treatment of midwifery forms a chapter within the section of his Muqaddima devoted to professions and crafts. Acknowledging the professional expertise of midwives, he notes that they are “better acquainted than a skillful [male] physician” not only with obstetrics but with the medical treatment of infants (p. 3). Ibn al-Ḥājj, perhaps predictably, depicts midwives as ignorant folk practitioners whose customs are harmful to infants; he denounces in detail the non-sharʿī customs and ritual practices that they perform in conjunction with childbirth. Giladi acknowledges that these two authors may be describing midwives of different social strata or forms of training.eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccessMuslimPremodern Middle EastMuslim MidwivesReview Article10.1093/ahr/121.2.6821212682683WOS:000375439500168Q1