Female Citizenship in the Middle East: Comparing family law reform in Morocco, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon
In: Middle East Law and GovernanceSearch for other papers by Rania Maktabi in
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This article explores the relationship between type of court system, parliamentary reform, and expanded female citizenship in four Arab states between 1990 and 2010. I argue that female citizens have acquired wider civil rights through parliament in relatively homogenous states with unitary court systems than in multireligious states with dual court systems. In Egypt and Morocco, unitary courts curbed clerical judicial authority over family law and weakened the resilience of conservative religious authorities. In these states, renewed pressures for reform after 1990 yielded strengthened female civil rights. In Syria and Lebanon, dual courts safeguard the judicial autonomy of clerics and enable them to resist pressures for family law reform more forcefully. In these states, little changed because the interests of political and religious authorities converge in ways that bolster group-based citizenship and constrain the civil rights of female citizens.
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2)
Suad Joseph, “Gender and Citizenship in Middle Eastern States,” Middle East Report, 198 (1996): 49.
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3)
See Chantal Mouffe, The return of the political (London: Verso, 2005), 70 who points out that “some existing rights have been constituted on the very exclusion or subordination of the rights of other categories.”
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12)
Hanna Malik, al-ahwal ash-shakhsiyya wa mahakimiha lil-tawa’if al-masihiyya fi lubnan wa suriyya (Beirut: dar an-nahar lil-nashr, 1991), 343.
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Adel Guindy, “Family status issues among Egypt’s Copts: A brief overview,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 11, no. 3 (2007).
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15)
See Mounira Charrad, States and women’s rights: the making of postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 161-2, 67.; and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Marriage on trial: Islamic family law in Iran and Morocco (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 26-7. The Jewish community retained its own family law and Rabbinical court. Léon Buskens, “Recent debates on family law reform in Morocco: Islamic law as politics in an emerging public sphere,” Islamic Law & Society 10, no. 1 (2003): 76.
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19)
Since independence in 1943, Lebanon has professed an open laissez-faire economy, paired with low degrees of censorship and political repression. In Syria, the socialist pan-Arab Baath party has ruled since 1963 through centralist economic policies and repression of political dissidents. Authoritarian rule has, since 1970, been dominated by the Muslim Alawite minority, which current President Bashar al-Asad belongs to.
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20)
Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural jurisdictions: cultural differences and women’s rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 51-4.
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22)
Akram Yaghi, qawanin al-ahwal ash-shakhsiyya lada al-tawa’if al-islamiyya wal-masihiyya. (Beirut: manshurat zein al-huquqiyya, 2008), 55, 59-60.
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Laurie A. Brand, Women, the state, and political liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African experiences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
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Aharon Layish, “The transformation of the Shari’a from jurist’s law to statutory law in the contemporary Muslim world,” Die Welt des Islams 44, no. 1 (2004): 98.
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Singermann, “Rewriting divorce in Egypt”, 162. Judith E. Tucker, Women, family and gender in Islamic law (Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2008), 128. The law enables a woman to initiate her own divorce if she waives her financial rights, such as dowry and maintenance, by introducing a shari’a tenet known as ‘khul’.
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35)
Mulki al-Sharmani, “Egyptian Family Courts: Pathway to Women’s Empowerment?”, Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World, 7, (2009): 89-119.
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Gamal Essam El-Din, “Children accorded greater rights,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 12-18 June, 2008, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/901/eg4.htm.
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Buskens, “Recent debates on family law reform in Morocco”, 91.
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Janine A. Clark and Amy E. Young, “Islamism and Family Law Reform in Morocco and Jordan,” Mediterranean Politics 13, no. 3 (2008): 340.
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Neil Hicks, “Transnational human rights networks and human rights in Egypt,” in Human Rights in the Arab World, ed. Anthony Tirado and Hamzawy Chase, Amr (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 82-3.
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See Mir-Hosseini, “How the door to Ijtihad was opened and closed”, 1510.
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Maktabi, “Gender, family law and citizenship in Syria”, 567-8.
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Brand, Women, the state, and political liberalization, 6, 3.
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Jean Said Makdisi, “The mythology of modernity: women and democracy in Lebanon,” in Women and Islam: Critical concepts in sociology, ed. Haideh Moghissi (London, New York: Routledge, 2005), 346-7. Annika Rabo, “Family law in multicultural and multireligious Syria,” in Possibilities of religious pluralism, ed. Göran Collste, Linköping Studies in Identity and Pluralism (Linköping: Linköping University Electronic, 2005), 84.
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Female Citizenship in the Middle East: Comparing family law reform in Morocco, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon
In: Middle East Law and GovernanceSearch for other papers by Rania Maktabi in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This article explores the relationship between type of court system, parliamentary reform, and expanded female citizenship in four Arab states between 1990 and 2010. I argue that female citizens have acquired wider civil rights through parliament in relatively homogenous states with unitary court systems than in multireligious states with dual court systems. In Egypt and Morocco, unitary courts curbed clerical judicial authority over family law and weakened the resilience of conservative religious authorities. In these states, renewed pressures for reform after 1990 yielded strengthened female civil rights. In Syria and Lebanon, dual courts safeguard the judicial autonomy of clerics and enable them to resist pressures for family law reform more forcefully. In these states, little changed because the interests of political and religious authorities converge in ways that bolster group-based citizenship and constrain the civil rights of female citizens.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1088 | 177 | 26 |
| Full Text Views | 539 | 59 | 5 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 360 | 91 | 10 |