Projects > Who's Afraid of Shari'a? Islamic Family Law, Women's Activism, and                          Everyday Forms of the Religious Life

What is the place of Islamic law in today’s world? How can women’s rights be expressed within its framework? How and why are debates about women’s rights tied to ideas about “reforming” Islamic law?

“Who’s Afraid of Shari'a Law?” is a project helmed by Lila Abu-Lughod, the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference (CCASD) which seeks ways to move beyond the polarized debates about women’s rights in Muslim societies. These debates divide those who advocate shari’a as a symbol (and practice) of authenticity and those who fear it as a sign of fundamentalist obscurantism, often in the name of secularism.  In the past two decades, the application of Islamic law to the regulation of women’s everyday lives has generated great controversy but has also inspired innovative thinking by feminists.

  

The project is divided into two phases. Phase One focuses on Islamic Family Law between international politics and local practice. This phase culminated in a spring 2011 conference at Columbia’s Global Center in Amman, Jordan on women’s rights, family law, and the politics of consent. Consent is crucial to the ways we imagine Muslim women’s rights to be infringed as well as to the ways reformers are attempting to guarantee them. What does consent mean in matters of intimate relationships? Is it the same concept in Islamic legal reasoning as in liberalism?

Phase Two is comprised of a series of three workshops on “Is Islamic Reform Secular? Women’s Activism and Everyday Forms of the Religious Life.” Abu-Lughod and her team look at competing legal systems, religious and secular, and at the rise of groups advocating for women’s rights within Muslim societies.  What are the crucial components in making such organizations effective and respected? Do they represent a positive model for democratic rights for women? Do recent transnational activist initiatives on behalf of Muslim women’s rights result in cooperation across difference, and if so, with what sacrifices and exclusions? 

The first of these intensive workshops took place in Spring 2010 and was a huge success.

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Prof. Abu-Lughod is interviewed on Jadaliyya about her new volume, SOCIALDIFFERENCE-ONLINE.

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Prof. Abu-Lughod and her team are honored to have papers from the spring 2011 conference, Religious Law, Local Practice, and Global Debates about Muslim Women’s Rights: The Politics of Consent included in the first volume of SocialDifference-online, published by the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. The volume is available for download here.

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photo 1, L,Amal Haddideen, Reem al-Botmeh, Lila Abu-Lughod,

Lena Moller. Photo 2, R, of Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Explore the spring 2011 conference, Religious Law, Local Practice, and Global Debates about Muslim Women’s Rights: The Politics of Consent. Held at the Columbia University Center for Middle East Research (CUMERC) in Amman Jordan, from April 8-10, 2011, the conference was the second in a series of conversations and workshops conceived under the rubric “Who’s Afraid of Shari’a?” by CCASD’s working group on “Liberalism’s Others.” The urgency of exploring this theme comes from the contentious and highly polarized debates in the public sphere—whether in Europe, the U.S. or in countries of the Muslim world--about the threat Shari’a, or Islamic law, might pose to women’s rights.

More information is available below.

 

View Conference Schedule  |  Why focus on "Consent"? |  Read Participant Bios

A distillation of three sets of conclusions from the innovative work of this group of experts on gender, law and the everyday in various Muslim communities is below.

1) Historical and ethnographic studies of the everyday life of Shari’a in communities suggest that gender and family law on the ground are quite complex, and the spaces of legal regulation multiple. The law itself is hybrid; women are governed and realize themselves through civil, personal status, and customary forms of social regulation. These parallel and intertwining legal structures regulate women’s lives and circumscribe their existence, but they also enable women’s choices and decisions. The sensitive case studies presented at the workshop thus outlined women’s legal strategies for using law as an instrument to advance their interests—whether in choosing their partners, enhancing their position within family and kinship structure, or responding to sexual violence. Rather than taking narratives of female victimhood at face value, workshop participants consistently emphasized the importance of legal knowledge (and the presence of feminist legal practitioners) in allowing women to enter the conflictual spaces of legal adjudication.

 

2) The fact that law is embodied in courts (and that legal cases demand expert knowledge) underscores the importance of working with legal texts to challenge normative interpretations of “Islamic law.” Because the entity called “Islamic law” is as much the product of repressive regimes in the Muslim world and histories of male interpretation as it is the legacy of Orientalist readings of Islam more generally, feminist work on legal reform confronts a complicated field in which it is not easy to distinguish between liberalism and Islamic law. Reform efforts, whether in personal status law or in creating model marriage contracts, take place at the national level, the religious community level, and through women’s advocacy. They reflect the strategic, experimental and vibrant nature of feminist legal reform in the Muslim world today. Lawyers and activists are working with and within the state. Simultaneously, they are exploring alternate mechanisms of conflict resolution located in religious and community structures. Even when they have been unsuccessful, as when drafts of new personal status laws are shot down in parliament, these efforts have moved the debates in new directions.

 

3) Debates over personal status law/Shari’a/Islamic law are always deeply political. The kinds of politics in which law is embedded include: internal conflicts among classes, ethnic groups, or political factions, as in Iran or in Israel/Palestine; national and regional political struggles, including bids for autonomy against continuing colonial control, as in Aceh,Indonesia; majority/minority community competition and violence, as between Hindus and Muslims in India; and international intervention, military, economic, and humanitarian, around the world. Tracing debates over how Shari’a, in the special form of personal status laws that regulate women and family, has been accommodated and contested in diverse contexts sheds new light on the ways that women’s rights, desires, and freedoms enter the public sphere at moments of “crisis.”  The challenge is to appreciate the specific dynamics of different national and regional contexts while at the same time looking across the Muslim world in the larger context of the shifting geopolitics of empire. Only this approach can reveal how debates about Muslim women’s rights are enabling a complex reworking of the global order.