Lindbekk, Monika

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Lund University Publications

LUND UNIVERSITYPO Box 117221 00 Lund+46 46-222 00 00Review of Mulki al-Sharmani, Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt: NegotiatingMuslim Family Law.Lindbekk, MonikaPublished in:Religion and Gender2019Document Version:Peer reviewed version (aka post-print)Link to publicationCitation for published version (APA):Lindbekk, M. (2019). Review of Mulki al-Sharmani, Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt: NegotiatingMuslim Family Law. Religion and Gender, 9(1).Total number of authors:1General rightsUnless other specific re-use rights are stated the following general rights apply:Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authorsand/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by thelegal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private studyor research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portalRead more about Creative commons licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will removeaccess to the work immediately and investigate your claim.Book ReviewReligion and Gender© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/18785417-00901009Mulki al-Sharmani, Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt: Negotiating MuslimFamily Law, AUC Press 2018, 224 pp., ISBN 9789774167751.The book by author Mulki al-Sharmani—an Academy of Finland research fel-low and docent at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Finland—is amultidimensional inquiry basedon ethnographicwork inEgypt’s family courts.The book departs from the premise that Muslim family law has been the maindomain where women face inequalities. This is amplified by the fact that Mus-lim family law faithfully adheres to traditional constructs of masculinity andfemininity by obliging the husband to provide for his wife in exchange for herobedience (taʿa). Because of the intimate connection between Muslim fam-ily legislation and Islamic law, family law reform is a contentious issue. Yet, inthe period from 2000–2005, a series of significant reforms were passed, whichchallenged male authority in the family. Most significant of these was the so-called law of khulʿ from 2000which entitled the wife the right to separate fromher husband based on her unilateral expression of resentment. She shouldalso renounce her outstanding financial rights, restore the prompt dower toher husband and go through reconciliation sessions. Then, in 2004, special-izedmediation-based family courts were introduced. The aimbehind the courtreformwas to provide litigants with a more accessible and efficient justice sys-tem, a goal supported by international donors.The book consists of five chapters. The first chapter of the book fills a gap inthe scholarly literature on the implementation of shariaʾ-derived legislation inEgypt by looking at the understandings and goals of different actors who wereinvolved in the creation of therapeutic, problem-solving, family-friendly jus-tice system in 2004. The book adopts a novel perspective by arguing that notonly the content of the law matters, but also the process of enacting the law.Thus, the rushed and top-down nature of the reform process which failed totake into account the reservations of various nongovernmental organizationshave resulted in gaps and contradictions. The author convincingly argues thatthe family courts fail to provide disputants with a therapeutic, problem-solvingand family-friendly legal system as a result of these gaps.Chapter 2 and 3 examine the legal agency of women and how they expe-rience the legal process. While Egyptian judicial practice is multi-layered, al-Sharmani finds in chapter 2 that some discourses are more dominant thanothers: among these is a prevalent notion of qiwamah—male guardianship orauthority—and underlying assumptions about women as the dependents ofmen in the realm of the family despite the significant legal reform enacted atthe beginning of the 21st century. The author convincingly argues that the dualgender discourses can be attributed to a disconnect between legal and cultural132 Book Reviewsconstructions of marital roles on the one hand, and the complex lived realitiesof men and women on the other. As a consequence of this disconnect manymen are unable to discharge their economic obligations as dictated by classicIslamic law and modern personal status codes. Meanwhile, chapter 3 exam-ines the opportunities and challenges experienced by women seeking judicialdivorce through khulʿ based on interviews with 131 female plaintiffs. Here, theauthor builds onNadia Sonneveld’s book Khulʿ Divorce in Egypt: Public Debates,Judicial Practices, and Everyday Life from 2012, and argues that while womenfrom all walks of life petition for khul, it is particularly poor women who useit as a strategy for navigating difficult marginalized lives of urban poverty. Al-Sharmani demonstrates that knowledgeability of the law combined with therole their families play out in the decision-making about legal option.Chapter 4 and 5 venture outside the courtroom. Crucially, chapter 4, whichcarries the title “Love and Other Matters”, shows the relevance of 2000s familylaw reforms beyond the courtrooms by examining the impact of the new lawson societal discourses and practices of marriage. Corroborating recent stud-ies, the book shows that implementation of the khulʿ law has become morestandardized and streamlined since the time of the law’s passing. Althoughfamily law reform remains contested in marriage norms and practices, judi-cial divorce through khulʾ appears to have become less controversial than itwas following its promulgation in 2000. At another level of analysis, chapter 5looks at initiatives for further family law reform. The author develops previousinsights by looking at how family law intersects with prevalent socio-religiousdiscourses, and she investigates the goals and perspectives of women activistswho attempted to extend women’s rights under Muslim personal status lawbefore the 2011 revolution.While much existing scholarship focuses on the constraining role of Islamas it exists in the form of legal codes, al-Sharmani provides a new perspec-tive by looking at the ways in which the Islamic legal tradition is invoked asa normative resource in modern arguments by diverse actors in the context ofEgypt. While some of the law proposals examined have a long lineage (mini-mum age of marriage, curbing men’s right of polygamy and repudiation, andexpanding women’s access to judicial divorce), new ground is being broken byproposed reforms that seek to cast marital relational commitments as shared.These normative shifts have to be seen in the light of the previously discussedrenegotiation of gender relations. The book concludes with somewords on thetrajectory of reform initiatives in the wake of the January 25 revolution. Takenas a whole, the author finds that for the time being, the dynamics of familylaw reform and especially the top-down and rushedmanner in which shariʿa isdefined have not been disrupted in post-2011 Egypt.

Review of Mulki al-Sharmani, Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt: Negotiating Muslim Family Law.

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Review of Mulki al-Sharmani, Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt: Negotiating Muslim Family Law.

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