Gender Equality in Muslim-Majority States and Shari’a Family Law: Is There a Link?

Abstract

This paper employs a newly developed coding of the degree to which Muslim-majority states incorporate a strict version of Shari’a family law into their legal code. This measures the feature of Islamic tradition, which is hypothesised to impede women's sociopolitical equality. I find that the incorporation of a strict version of Shari’a family law is an impediment to sociopolitical gender equality; however, the inclusion of other laws and policies based on Islamic tenets is not. Furthermore, the negative effect of an oil-dependent economy does not hold in the subset of Muslim-majority states once Shari’a family law inclusion is accounted for.

Keywords::

• democratisation
• gender equality
• Middle East politics
• Muslim-majority countries

Notes

¹There is consensus among the five schools regarding the general principles and foundations of laws relating to family issues. My coding scheme for incorporation of Shari’a family law is constructed so that the school of law a state follows does not affect how it scores on the variable.

²The data were obtained from the United Nations Statistics Division (2010).

³The Muslim-majority states that include Shari’a in their family law systems incorporate laws based on the predominant school of law in the state. The Hanafi school is predominant in South Asia, the Levant, the Balkans, Turkey and Egypt. The Maliki school predominates in North Africa (with the exception of Egypt), West Africa and Kuwait. The Shafi’i school is central in Southeast Asia, Somalia and Yemen. The Hanbali school predominates in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Ja’feri school is predominant in Iran. Some states derive laws from multiple schools, including Iraq and Lebanon which have laws based on both the Ja’feri and Hanafi schools. Each state’s laws governing the right to divorce and child custody were individually coded using primary and secondary sources. The list of sources is available on request from the author.

⁴I would like to thank Michael Ross for providing this measure.

⁵This brief study of Morocco and Tunisia and the data used in it precedes the reforms Morocco made to its family legal code in 2004, and therefore does not affect or bias the outcome.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fatima Z. Rahman

Fatima Z. Rahman assumed the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, in August 2012.