of the Max Planck Working Group on Child Law in Muslim Countries, a community of scholars of law, Islamic studies, anthropology, and history that has come together to revisit the concepts of family, children's rights, and parenthood in Muslim and Middle Eastern jurisdictions.In the rst phase of the study, the working group explored the mechanism of custody and guardianship of children in "regular" family settings. 1 In the second phase, the study was taken further, moving from parental care to the establishment of liation (nasab) and the schemes in place for the care and protection of "parentless" children, that is, children of uncertain, defective, or unknown liation (majhul al-nasab) or with unt parents. Both issues, the regulation of nasab and the care of children without permanent caretakers, are particularly thorny matters because they touch on a number of sensitive issues, including sexual relationships out of wedlock, biological fatherhood, and international pressure to implement child protection laws.A total of eighteen papers were commissioned: fourteen country studies discussing the legal framework governing the establishment of liation and care for parentless children and four thematic papers highlighting those topics in premodern Sunni and Shiite Islamic jurisprudence ( qh), Arab private international law, and public international law. Thus, while most of the country studies are being published in the form of an edited volume, 2 two country studies-one on India