Women and Muslim Family Laws in Arab States pdf

women and Muslim family laws in Arab states – a comparative overview of textual development and advocacy

Lynn Welchman

WOMEN AND MUSLIM FAMILY LAWS IN ARAB STATES – A COMPARATIVE OVERVIEW OF TEXTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND ADVOCACY

In the late twentieth century, a combination of geopolitical developments focussed particular attention on ‘the Islamic shariªa’ and specifically on its role as an identity and legitimacy signifier for opposition movements in and the governments of Muslim majority states. Positivist approaches to legislative power concentrated on the statutory expression of rules in different areas of state law.

 After varying periods of independent statehood, a number of post-colonial states promulgated instruments of statutory law presented as reintroducing the rules and sanctions of Islamic criminal law into penal systems otherwise largely based on colonial legislation. Systems of Islamic banking and Islamic finance developed apace.

Constitutional arguments focused on the various formulations through which ‘the shariªa’ or ‘the prin-ciples of the shariªa’ are or should be established as a source (or the source) of statutory legislation.

In different Muslim majority states, courts became a site for contestation of different perceptions of the requirements of the shariªa and the extent to which statutory laws and the state-appointed judiciary would defend or concede to these different invocations of ‘Islamic law’.1

Very much part of this context is the high degree of political attention currently paid to Muslim family law developments in Arab states and elsewhere, both in Muslim majority states and in countries where Muslims are a minority.

At the same time, the particular focus on statutory expressions of the shariªa governing family relations has been a more consistent feature in recent history than that on certain other areas of state law.

Scholars in the Western academy have described family law variously as the ‘last bastion’ or ‘last stronghold’ of the shariªa, evoking in such metaphors an image of the forces ranged against (secularist reformers, European colonial powers, encroaching state authorities, among others) and of the defenders of the fort (variously, the establishment sharªi scholars and judiciary, and/or non-establishment constituencies).2

The metaphors evoke ideas of siege and battle re-inforced in current times by the forces of cultural globalisation, forces both insidious and rampaging. Historically, they relate to the processes of codifi-