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Drawing on legal and ad th texts from the formative and classical periods of Islamic legal history, this book offers an overview of the development of the questions prominent jurists asked and answered about women s issues. All assumed a woman would marry and thus the book concentrates on women s family life. The introduction establishes the historical framework within which the jurists worked. A chapter on Qur n verses devoted to women s lives is followed by chapters on marriage and divorce which compare the views of jurists during the formative period. The fourth chapter describes the evolution from the formative to the classical periods. The fifth uses material from both periods to describe the array of legal opinion about other aspects of women s lives in and outside their homes. Throughout, jurists opinions are juxtaposed with relevant quotations from contemporaneous ad th collections.
The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, through the British mandate and the establishment of the state of Israel, created a reality in which no Muslim legislator existed in the country. Thus, the chief judge—Qadi al Qudat, due to the dire need for reforms in the Sharia' family law and in order to minimize the intervention of the non-Muslim—Israeli legislator in the divine family law, took it upon himself to initiate the reforms. As such, this experience is considered the world-wide pioneerand unique in its scope. The reforms were done in accordance with the Islamic rules of renewal and are derived from the Islamic jurisprudence—sharia' itself. This process was done in two tracks: first, decisions of the High Court of Appeals would be followed by the lower courts as binding precedents. Second, the president of the High Sharia' court issued judicial decrees guidelines to the lower courts, driven by the Maslaha - the public interest - in various matters of Islamic law such as promoting women status, children's rights and the preservation of Islamic sites and cemeteries sanctity.
Islamic law has traditionally prohibited women from being prayer leaders and heads of state. A small number of Muslims today are beginning to challenge this stance, but they face considerable opposition from the broader Muslim community. ‘Women and Leadership in Islamic Law’ examines the assumption within much existing feminist scholarship that the patriarchal nature of pre-Islamic and early Muslim Near Eastern Society is the primary reason for the development of Islamic legal rulings prohibiting women from leadership positions. It claims that the evolution of Islamic law was a complex process, shaped by numerous cultural, historical, political and social factors, as well as scriptural s...
This book examines the life of women in the Indonesian province of Aceh, where Islamic law was introduced in 1999. It outlines how women have had to face the formalisation of conservative understandings of sharia law in regulations and new state institutions over the last decade or so, how they have responded to this, forming non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that have shaped local discourse on women’s rights, equality and status in Islam, and how these NGOs have strategised, demanded reform, and enabled Acehnese women to take active roles in influencing the processes of democratisation and Islamisation that are shaping the province. The book shows that although the formal introduction...
It is widely held today that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do housework. Wives’ purported exemption from domestic labor became a talking point among Muslims responding to Orientalist stereotypes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” by the late nineteenth century, and it has been a prominent motif in writings by Muslim feminists in the United States since the 1980s. In Wives and Work, Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives’ domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics. She reconstructs a complex discussion among Sunni legal scholars of the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE and examines its wide-ranging...
Mona Samadi examines the sources of gender differences within the Islamic tradition, with particular focus on guardianship, and describes the opportunities and challenges for advancing the legal status of women.
The related issue of introduction of a common civil code, doing away with religiously discriminating laws, is considered.
An extremely timely translation of a seminal text on the role of women in Muslim society by the early twentieth century thinker al Taher al-Haddad. Considered as one of the first feminist works in Arab literature, this book will be of considerable interest to scholars of an early "feminist" tract coming from a Muslim in Arab society. Awarded the 2008 "World Award of the President of the Republic of Tunisia for Islamic Studies"
In an rewarding new study, Tucker explores the way in which Islamic legal thinkers understood Islam as it related to women and gender roles. In seventeenth and eighteenth century Syria and Palestine, Muslim legal thinkers gave considerable attention to women's roles in society, and Tucker shows how fatwas, or legal opinions, greatly influenced these roles. She challenges prevailing views on Islam and gender, revealing Islamic law to have been more fluid and flexible than previously thought. Although the legal system had a consistent patriarchal orientation, it was modulated by sensitivities to the practical needs of women, men, and children. In her comprehensive overview of a field long negl...