Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt. Mulki al-Sharmani

home with their children. Notably, the law was revoked by the Supreme Constitutional Court in 1985. And after 2000, a series of films that satirized the new and contested khul‘ law were made. The anthropologist Nadia Sonneveld, in an insightful study of khul‘ in Egypt, examines some of these movies and their depictions of societal resistance and contestations of the law and their underlying gendered assumptions about marital roles and women’s moral character (Sonneveld 2012). All of the above movies, as artistic expressions of the public discourse in the country, underscore that family law has been the main domain where Egyptian women confront inequalities and where justice has eluded them. Family law has also been the site where women’s rights advocates and diverse state and non-state actors have been pursuing reform of gender rights.

      The focus of this book, similarly, is on Egyptian Muslim family law and gender justice. It is a modest effort to engage with three dimensions of the relationship between the reform of family law and the pursuit of gender justice. Adopting Joan Scott’s definition, I understand gender to be “not simply . . . how men and women are being defined in relation to one another, but also . . . what visions of social order are being contested, built upon, resisted, and defended in terms of those male/female definitions” (Scott 2013: 74). In the context of researching family law, the question of gender is layered. It is related to (but also goes beyond) the legal identities that are constructed for men and women in the context of marriage (for example, male providers/guardians versus female dependents) and the assumed rights and responsibilities that go with these identities. It is also the question of systems of meaning in which family law intersects with prevalent socioreligious discourses to create, reproduce, or destabilize social relations (and their power dynamics) in which women and men are situated.

      The first dimension of the relationship between family law and gender justice which this book will tackle is the process of legal reform and how it shapes the written texts of new laws and their subsequent implementation. The issue of process raises a number of significant questions: Who are the actors advocating for particular reforms? What are the goals driving their reform efforts? How do they understand these reforms and their purposes? How do their reform strategies play out? For instance, what happens when, in the pursuit of legal reforms, alliances are made between actors with divergent goals and different understandings of the underlying philosophy and purposes of the proposed new laws? What are the ramifications for the goals of gender justice?

      The second dimension of this relationship is concerned with women’s legal agency and experiences of the legal process. The questions that come to the fore in this aspect are: How do women use new laws? How do they experience the legal process? What opportunities and challenges do the legal reforms create for women with regard to legal options, the ability to exercise a particular option, and the ability to resolve disputes or make claims to particular rights?

      Thirdly, the book explores the role and impact of legal reforms outside the courtroom. How do family law and its reform impact marriage norms and practices? How do they impact the lived realities of spousal roles? What options or challenges do the reforms create for women as they navigate gender relations as single or married women? The book will examine these three dimensions, focusing on the period from 2000 to 2010. This was an important period that ushered in significant legal gains for women. I focus on two of the reforms that were introduced at the time: the new family courts that were established in 2004 and the khul‘ law that was legislated in 2000.

       Reforming Egyptian Personal Status Laws: 2000–2010

      The first five years of the new millennium in Egypt witnessed a vibrant period of legal reform in the family domain with important but also mixed ramifications (and challenges) for women’s rights. On January 26, 2000, the Egyptian Parliament passed the Personal Status Law (hereafter PSL) No. 1 of 2000. The new code, which was titled “The Law for Reorganization of Certain Terms and Procedures of Litigation in Personal Status Matters,” serves primarily to regulate and facilitate the litigation process in family disputes. Unlike the several hundred clauses of previous procedural laws that regulated the legal process in family dispute cases, PSL No. 1 consists of a mere seventy-nine articles.² This new and concise procedural law was to make efficient the proceedings of family law cases, which would accordingly cut down on the amount of time and resources that disputants, most of whom tend to be women, spend on litigation.

      But the most significant, and contested, article in this procedural law is Article 20, which grants women the right to petition for khul‘ divorce. In this type of divorce, female disputants do not need to claim or substantiate to the court any fault-based grounds for their divorce petition and their husbands’ consent is not required, provided that they forfeit their right to the mahr (dower) and all post-divorce financial rights. The khul‘ article also stipulates a period of ninety-day arbitration during which reconciliation is attempted by court-appointed arbiters before the court judgment is issued. The khul‘ article was met with a lot of opposition from different sectors of the society. Opponents of the law argued that it would be abused by irrational and morally weak wives. It was also argued that the new law contravened Islamic sharia since it did not require the husband’s consent, unlike the case in the main schools of Islamic jurisprudence where khul‘ is framed as a divorce initiated by the wife but only obtained through negotiation with the husband (Fawzy 2004; Singerman 2005; Sonneveld 2012; Tucker 2008). PSL No. 1 also granted women another substantive and controversial right: Article 17 gives women who are in ‘urfi marriages, which are unregistered marriages, the right to file for divorce. The idea behind this article is to give women a way out of unregistered marriages that are not recognized by law, and thus women in such marriages lack legal rights such as spousal maintenance, alimony, and inheritance.

      Then in March 2004, PSL No. 10 was passed, which introduced the new family courts. The idea behind the new courts is to enable disputants to resolve their conflicts through legal mechanisms that are non-adversarial, family-friendly, inexpensive, and efficient. In particular, the new courts system had a number of distinct features with the goal of putting in place alternative mechanisms of dispute resolution. For instance, before disputants can begin the litigation process, they are obligated to go through court mediation, undertaken by three settlement specialists (akhissa’iyin al-taswiya) who are trained in social work/sociology, psychology, and law respectively. In addition, the lawsuits are adjudicated by a panel of three judges who are specialized in family law and who are assisted by two court experts (khubara’ al-mahkama). The latter are trained in social work/sociology and psychology, and one of these experts has to be a woman. Another important feature of the new legal system is the abolishment of adjudication on the level of the Court of Cassation, thus reducing the amount of time and expenses spent in litigation.

      The new family courts, despite being a procedural reform, were to have significant (but also mixed) implications for women’s access to justice. On the one hand, the new courts, with their mediation-based mechanisms of dispute resolution, were hailed as an important reform that would greatly facilitate women’s pursuit of legal claims, particularly in maintenance and divorce cases, which often cost disputants a lot of time and resources.³ On the other hand, the role of the new courts system was also depicted in the public discourse as salvaging marriages and ensuring the stability of families through its mediation-based mechanisms.⁴ It was this latter notion that made some nongovernmental women’s rights organizations wary at the time, particularly since the substantive personal status laws that were being implemented in these courts remained premised on gender hierarchies and unequal spousal and parental rights.

      In the same year, a third new law was passed, PSL No. 11, which established the Family Security Fund. The function of this state fund is to dispense court-ordered spousal and child maintenance to ‘vulnerable’ plaintiffs, and the relevant state institutions undertake the task of collecting the money from husbands/fathers. Lastly, in 2005, PSL No. 4 was promulgated. This law grants divorced women the right to the custody of their children until they reach the age of fifteen.

      In addition, in August of 2000, the Ministry of Justice introduced a new marriage contract with a marked blank space