Law-making in Jordan: Family Law Reform and the Supreme Justice Department
In: Islamic Law and SocietyUsing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice as a theoretical framework, I establish links between the structure of the Jordanian legal system, processes of reforming family law between 2001 and 2010, and the development of the content of family law. The dāʾirat qāḍī al-quḍāt, the Supreme Justice Department (SJD), is a state institution that enjoys considerable autonomy in overseeing the sharīʿa courts that apply Islamic family law. As the Jordanian king chose not to participate in the reform process, the SJD came to dominate the reform process, which concluded with the issuing of the 2010 family law. Its control over the reform process allowed it to influence the content of the law. This article is based on semi-structured interviews as well as written sources such as Jordanian family laws, procedural laws, minutes of parliamentary debates, royal speeches, and relevant statistics.
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Janine A. Clark and Amy E. Young, “Islamism and Family Law Reform in Morocco and Jordan,” Mediterranean Politics 13:3 (2008), 333-53, at 337.
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8
Rania Maktabi, “Female Citizenship in the Middle East: Comparing family law reform in Morocco, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon,” Middle East Law and Governance 5: 3 (2013), 280-307.
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Pierre Bourdieu, “The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field,” The Hastings Law Journal 38 (July 1987), 805-53, at 817; Translation and foreword by Richard Terdiman.
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Avi Rubin, “Modernity as a Code: The Ottoman Empire and the Global Movement of Codification,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59:5 (2016), 849.
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Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 37.
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Iris Agmon, Family & Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in late Ottoman Palestine (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 74.
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Avi Rubin, “Ottoman Judicial Change in the Age of Modernity: A Reappraisal,” History Compass 7:1 (January 2009), 119-40: at 129.
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Lynn Welchman, Beyond the Code: Muslim Family Law and the Shariʼa Judiciary in the Palestinian West Bank (Hague, Boston: Kluwer Law International, 2000), 38.
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Lynn Welchman, Beyond the Code: Muslim Family Law and the Shariʼa Judiciary in the Palestinian West Bank (Hague, Boston: Kluwer Law International, 2000), 43.
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Rana Husseini, “Women’s rights activists, local pundits express shock and dismay over Lower House rulings,” Jordan Times, August 9, 2003.
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Jordanian government, “Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women”, 9. The JWU, by contrast, asked that divorce be valid only when carried out in front of a judge in order to increase judicial control over divorce. Interview with a JWU member, September 11, 2012, Amman. The demand was rejected by the SJD: sharīʿa judges argued Islamic law places no restrictions on a man’s right to divorce. This was the predominant attitude within the reform commission, according to one of its members. Interview with a professor of the sharīʿa faculty of the University of Jordan, Amman, September 25, 2011.
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136
Myriam Ababsa, “Exclusion and Norms: Enforcing Women’s Rights to Property in Jordan,” in Rules on Paper, Rules in Practice: Enforcing Laws and Policies in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Edouard Al-Dahdah et al. (Washington, D.C.: Direction in Development, World Bank Group, 2016), 108.
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Myriam Ababsa, “Exclusion and Norms: Enforcing Women’s Rights to Property in Jordan,” in Rules on Paper, Rules in Practice: Enforcing Laws and Policies in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Edouard Al-Dahdah et al. (Washington, D.C.: Direction in Development, World Bank Group, 2016), 110.
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Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 84. Edited and introduced by Randal Johnson.
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Frances Susan Hasso, Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011), 13.
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Law-making in Jordan: Family Law Reform and the Supreme Justice Department
In: Islamic Law and SocietyUsing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice as a theoretical framework, I establish links between the structure of the Jordanian legal system, processes of reforming family law between 2001 and 2010, and the development of the content of family law. The dāʾirat qāḍī al-quḍāt, the Supreme Justice Department (SJD), is a state institution that enjoys considerable autonomy in overseeing the sharīʿa courts that apply Islamic family law. As the Jordanian king chose not to participate in the reform process, the SJD came to dominate the reform process, which concluded with the issuing of the 2010 family law. Its control over the reform process allowed it to influence the content of the law. This article is based on semi-structured interviews as well as written sources such as Jordanian family laws, procedural laws, minutes of parliamentary debates, royal speeches, and relevant statistics.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 633 | 80 | 5 |
| Full Text Views | 105 | 4 | 2 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 85 | 8 | 0 |