Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 49

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Family Law in Islam: Divorce, Marriage and Women in the Muslim World
By: Maaike Voorhoeve, Editor
Family Law in Islam: Divorce, Marriage and Women in the Muslim World. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012. 240pp. $99.00.
ISBN: 9781848857421.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Kenneth M. Cuno, PhD
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This collection presents recent and ongoing research by several scholars in law, anthropology, and sociology. As such, some of the chapters have
the feel of preliminary reports, but they are, nevertheless valuable for their insight and contemporaneity. In modern times, “family law in Islam”
really means the plethora of codes based on Muslim jurisprudence that govern family life. The differences from one personal status law (PSL) to
another—not a theme emphasized in this volume, but something apparent in the reading— indicate that Muslim jurisprudence becomes nationalized
when codified. One wonders whether we can speak of family law in Islam as opposed to law and the family in different Muslim countries. In spite
of the subtitle invoking the Muslim world, the legal systems actually discussed are those of Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia.
The chapters are organized in two sections under the rubrics “discourses on the law” and “discourses of the law.” The former refers to the law as a
subject of public discussion and debate, and the latter to the law as it is practiced, including what legal practitioners have to say about it. In the first
section, Susanne Dahlgren’s informative chapter on Yemeni PSL shows how the gains achieved for women in the Arab world’s only Marxist state,
the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), 1967-90, were rolled back after unification with the more conservative Yemen Arab
Republic. The 1974 PSL of the PDRY incorporated reforms adopted elsewhere in the Muslim world in the 20th century. It ended forced marriage,
reined in excessive dowers (mahr), restricted polygyny, and limited men’s right to unilateral divorce. More unusual was a provision making both
spouses financially responsible for the household. These reforms were embedded in a modernist rhetoric proclaiming women’s vital role as mothers
and participants in state building. Post-unification, the rhetoric shifted from modernity to the prescriptions of Islam for family life. A more
conservative PSL was adopted in 1992, promoted by the Islamist Islah Party. Women’s rights activists have also shifted their rhetorical appeals
from modernism to Islamic correctness. This strategy has met with some success: the re-introduction of bayt al-ta‘a (house of obedience) was
blocked, as was a proposed Saudi-style committee for promoting virtue and combating vice.
A similar dynamic driven by contestation between religious conservatives and women’s rights advocates is apparent in Arzoo Oslanloo’s discussion
of how women and family issues have been framed in post-revolutionary Iran. A pre-revolutionary discourse of women’s rights was discredited by
its association with Western-style individualism, denigrated as “entitlement without responsibility.” Revolutionary discourse replaced “rights talk”
with an emphasis on women’s status as “‘the crowning jewels of the family,” the family being understood to be “the foundation of society.” As in
Yemen, the socially important role of women as wives and mothers was embraced in Islamist thought and rhetoric. President Muhammad Khatami
(1997-2005) sought to enhance the status of women through a state-sponsored Center for Women's Participation (CWP), which, among other things
was charged with studying how Iranian law could be reconciled with the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women. Had that move been successful it would have re-instated an agenda of women’s rights. But his successor, President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad, renamed the CWP the Center for Women and Family Affairs, signaling a shift in focus, again, from rights to status. However, in
another parallel with Dahlgren’s narrative, Iranian legislators recently shelved a proposal to make it easier for married men to contract temporary
marriages on the ground that permanent marriage is foundational to society (and viewed as more religiously correct). The point that emerges in both
chapters is that Islamist thought has embraced the modernist ideal of the conjugal family to a large extent, and that, within that discursive frame,
women’s status can be enhanced by appeals to religious principles.
A similar point is made in Massimo di Ricco’s study of Druze female activists in Lebanon. In Lebanon’s confessional system of government, 19
different religious communities have official recognition, and there are 16 different PSLs. The officially recognized sects are more independent of
the state than in any other Arab country, their autonomy e