Palestinian Women And Muslim Family Law In The Mandate Period

In this volume, Brownson sheds new light on Palestinian Muslim women’s agency in shari‘a courts from the British Mandate period to the present. Her extensive archival research on wife-initiated maintenance claims, divorce, and child custody cases deepens our understanding of women’s position in the courts, demonstrating that Muslim women were and are active participants in their legal affairs. Using court registers and interviews, Brownson uncovers a variety of ways women have manipulated the system to their benefit despite its patriarchal bias. She also finds that few reforms were implemented during the Mandate period. The British were uninterested in improving colonized women’s legal status and sought to avoid further antagonizing Palestinians. At the same time, Palestinians wished to uphold the one indigenous institution they still controlled while both British rule and Zionism threatened their nationalist aspirations. Although Palestinian women have had few alternatives to using this male privileged system to redress grievances with their husbands and in-laws, they continue to resist its injustices every day. Brownson finds that women’s understanding of family law fundamentals has enabled some to deftly navigate the system; however, a unified, reformed law reflecting society's current needs is required so women can have full access to their rights.

This dissertation examines Palestinian Muslim women's interactions and negotiations within the Jerusalem Shari'a Court from 1925-1939. My research on nafaqa (so-called maintenance), female-initiated divorce, and child custody cases from Jerusalem and its surrounding villages expands on the scholarship that demonstrates Palestinian Muslim women were historically active participants in the shari'a court system and their legal affairs. Far from being passive and silenced, Palestinian Muslim women regularly initiated lawsuits and demanded their rights in court. In the nearly all of the cases examined here, the woman was appearing in court on her own initiative and most often she was arguing her own case. In addition, my interviews with Palestinian women suggests that most women had at least a general understanding of their rights in shari'a during this period, and women who took part in court proceedings were or soon became acutely aware of their rights and restraints.

Legal issues of personal status – including those implicating women's rights – continue to be a focal area of shari'a judicial practice in the Muslim world. Changing ideas of marriage, relations between the spouses, divorce, and the rights of divorcees and widows challenge the courts around the Arab world. In this context, the areas that came under the Palestinian Authority in 1994 command particular attention: the particular political and socio-economic circumstances that surround Palestine's progress toward full statehood have created a remarkable crucible for the synthesis of a new family law in the Arab world. This rigorous study of the interpretation and application of personal status law in the Palestinian West Bank (and to a lesser extent in the Gaza Strip) is the most extensive yet attempted. It presents a systematic analysis of the application of Islamic family law in nearly 10,000 marriage contracts, 1000 deeds of talaq (unilateral divorce) or khul' (divorce with renunciation), and 2000 judicial rulings over a time span that includes Jordanian rule and Israeli military occupation, updating this with material from the beginning of the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Taken into account are the sources of law used in the shari'a courts of the West Bank: the successive codes of family law (the Jordanian Law of Personal Status 1976 and its predecessor the Jordanian Law of Family Rights 1951), and traditional Hanafi rules and texts, along with commentaries by prominent contemporary shari'a scholars and Appeal Court decisions – as well as the amendments and modifications being sought by civil society actors (notably women's groups) in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as in Jordan.

A number of Arab states have recently either codified Muslim family law for the first time, or have issued amendments or new laws which significantly impact the statutory rights of women as wives, mothers and daughters. In Women and Muslim Family Laws in Arab States Lynn Welchman examines women's rights in Muslim family laws in Arab states across the Middle East while also surveying the public debates surrounding the issues. The author considers these new laws alongside older statutes to comment on the patterns and dynamics of change both in the texts of the laws, and in the processes through by which they are drafted and issued. She draws on original legal texts and explanatory statements as well as on extensive secondary literature particular to certain states for an insight into practice, and on; interventions by women's rights organizations and other parties to the debate in the press and in advocacy materials. The discussions are set in the contemporary global context that 'internationalises' the domestic and regional debates.The book considers laws in states from the Gulf to North Africa in regard to their approaches to issues of codification processes and issues of and of registration, capacity and guardianship in marriage, polygyny, the marital relationship, divorce and child custody. -- Publisher description.

Moving from tourism to health propaganda, marriage to beauty contest, mass communication to music, Middle Eastern and North African Societies in the Interwar Period offers a vibrant and dynamic picture of the region which goes beyond state borders.

The cases of Israel and Palestine offer a particularly interesting vantage point for analyzing 'uses of the past'. Both states' legal trajectories follow from developments in the late Ottoman and British Mandate (1922-1948) periods, and their legal frameworks are characterized by an interesting overlapping of legislations and legal traditions. At the same time, the different political and social contextual frameworks in which Palestinian Muslims operate (living in Palestine, i.e. West Bank and Gaza Strip, or inside Israel) have a profound impact on legal debates and the practical solutions devised by judges and practitioners. This poses unusual challenges to Palestinian Muslim legal theorists and practitioners about how to face modernity and social change, leading to an interesting debate among scholars of legal pluralism, legal anthropology and Muslim law. The book Uses of the Past focuses on the relationship between Gender and Shari'a, aiming at analyzing how the past of Muslim tradition is invoked when dealing with gender issues and family law and how it is used to support legal change and reform in contemporary Muslim discourse. This edited volume is one of the outcomes of the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) project "Understanding Shari'a: Past Perfect, Imperfect Present" (US-PPIP) and includes eight articles by international scholars and practitioners.

Implementation of Islamic family law varies widely across North Africa and the Middle East, here Dörthe Engelcke explores the reasons for this.