Collections of essays by different authors pose a number of problems. If everyone is of the same mind repetition may overwhelm the appreciation of multiple perspectives on the same subject; if the essays are too disparate the editors will either have to reach out for a common denominator or risk having their volume appear to have no unifying theme. In an age of scanning and photocopying editors can also expect that readers will pass on all but a few of the chapters thus further frustrating any attempt to carve out a new field or draw separated scholars into a common conversation.
To each of these problems of organization there are diverse solutions. The editors of the two volumes under review here have chosen quite different points of entry. In the one case the tone seems a bit out of keeping with all that their book contains; in the other the substantive linkages are readily discernible even if they are not fully highlighted by the editors. In both cases the essays are, without exception, enormously interesting, even if they do not always cohere in the ways their editors imply.
The introduction to Family Law in Islam, which Baudouin Dupret has co-authored with the book's editor Maaike Voorhoeve, seems to have a rather tenuous connection to the contributions; it is more an expression of the authors’ view of the field of Islamic legal studies than of what unites the essays in their own book. The authors argue for more empirical research in the field – an attribute their authors admirably exemplify – but they also suggest that a scholar's own interpretation of such findings is inappropriate, that law is predominantly about conflict resolution (when it may, in fact, articulate standards, maintain the sense of orderliness of a society, and not fully resolve differences), and that law is mostly performed through reference to texts (when discretion and procedure may actually be more important). They even complain that too much attention has been given to Islamic family law, yet they choose to edit a volume that is devoted to that subject exclusively. Their disagreement is clearly with Orientalists who emphasize etymology and scholarly disputes instead of how people approach their problems legally. In doing so they could not only be read to exclude interpretations the people themselves have not already supplied but to deprive the book's authors of adding their own sense of what is happening in the situations they have observed.
Fortunately, the authors bring both empirical findings and thoughtful interpretations to their work. Thus, Susanne Dahlgren shows that the language of debate about the morality of women and children in Yemen has indeed been cast in terms of Islam rather than modernity. Women have tried to counter those customary practices that work to their detriment by emphasizing religious bases for their rights, and they have had to do so in a context of significant political fluctuations. Similarly, Massimo di Ricco suggests that women activists among the Druze have been able to draw on their multiple bases of affiliation to fashion arguments in favour of legal reform. Arzoo Osanloo's Iranian case also shows that procedural and substantive alterations have led to the formation of “Islamico-civil” laws through which, despite incremental and variable results, there has been an increase in women's knowledge of the law and greater willingness to build on that knowledge for purposes of reform. Similarly, Nadia Sonneveld's fascinating study shows that informal marriages in Egypt are often a function of social pressures that lead a woman even to become a man's second wife (without having to be subject to the usual marital expenses), to share the costs of their marital arrangement, and to keep the marriage at once secret and yet known to some others (so she will be seen as a married woman) – all of which serve to invert many of the expectations of other marital forms.
The realities of courtroom proceedings are the subject of the studies in the second half of the book. Christine Hegel-Cantarella shows that delay is used to advantage by litigants, both to let matters calm down and to gain further useful knowledge. The huge number of backlogged cases in Egypt, the strategic advantage to many women of slowing the clock in order to continue their maintenance payments, and the fact that court delay “instigates alternative events” fit neatly with the social context of many disputes. In such an environment both Muslims and Christians commonly find it advantageous, as Esther van Eijk argues, to agree to an out-of-court settlement, and though many Muslim countries require conciliation efforts prior to entry of a judgment, the courts’ workload often leads to divorce requests by women being registered without great efforts at reconciliation. Delays and workload requirements can also work to the advantage of women in Tunisia where, as Sarah Vincent-Grosso demonstrates, the construction of evidence also plays a vital role in determining which of several forms of divorce may be successfully sought. So, too, Maaike Voorhoeve's own study of Tunisia emphasizes that the discretion of judges deeply affects the application of formal laws, fills the voids left by many statutes, and often expresses the courts’ own sensibilities and moral judgements.
If the foregoing volume underscores the subtle realities of women's involvement in legal cases and reform efforts, the essays in the handsomely produced Self-Determination collection range well beyond the Arab world and complement many of the points raised in the above essays. Here the articles may seem to be quite disparate but actually cluster around certain common themes. The physical situation of women is one such focus. Anissa Hélie notes that abortions, half of which are unsafe, are treated very differently in various Muslim countries, many of their laws being unchanged since colonial times and far out of touch with current needs. Similarly, violence against women is predominantly domestic, while rape is often regarded as an act against a family's honour rather than a physical and moral assault on the victim. Thus Saida Kouzzi and Stephanie Willman Bordat point to the 41,000 cases of domestic violence in Morocco in 2007, equally high rates being reported throughout the Muslim world. Consistent, too, with this theme, William G. Clarence-Smith and Claudia Merli, writing separately, indicate that female genital cutting was not indigenous to South-East Asia and customarily involved only minor nicking. However, as the influence of the Gulf States has increased, particularly as a result of migrant worker contacts, pressures have grown, especially among the Shafiʿi community of southern Thailand, to engage in what is regarded as an obligatory and far more radical procedure. Weak government enforcement of international conventions notwithstanding, interviews show that while many Muslim men oppose this practice, living with the husband's family often leads to pressure to cut even an adult woman convert.
Often it is local custom that either is equated with Islamic law or essentially displaces it. Aziza Ahmed's analysis indicates that in India, state and religious mechanisms combine in the subordination of women, such that secularization seldom replaces local community sentiment. In a backlash to the famous Shah Bono case, in which the Indian court overrode an Islamic law approach, the courts now give way to gender inequality by showing deference to village rules. Anthony Luyirika Kafume shows, too, that in Uganda not only are laws relating to women outdated, but that, so long as deference to custom is significant, state law, however justified in Islamic terms, may prove relatively toothless.
One way in which women may gain a significant degree of control over their marital situation is through the insertion of favourable terms in their marital contracts. Katja Zvan Elliott demonstrates that among Berbers in a rural community of Morocco women may lose maintenance if they work outside the house and cannot easily press for stipulations that might help them in this and other ways given the pressures of men and their own marital self-image. Bordat and Kouzzi offer another essay showing that throughout the Maghreb few women have such clauses in their marriage contracts fearing that if they push for them they will never find husbands. The authors’ own commitment to action on behalf of women in the region takes the form of urging them, through local NGOs, to press for such protective clauses that can at least serve as a vital supplement to those alternatives the law would allow.
Reform movements often build from just those elements the preceding essays have outlined. Anthony Marcus brings to light the situation in the Maldives with which few readers may be familiar. Reputed to have the highest divorce rate in the world, Marcus shows that local practice in that country allows great marital freedom to women and that top-down reform, quite aside from yielding confusing outcomes, may adversely affect these women's powers by substituting Western-style laws that actually provide fewer freedoms than those women customarily possess. Islamic law offers equally limited help to Maldivian women: the freedom of association and indigenous kinship obligations work to the favour of women better than do reforms based on Islam. Elsewhere, as in the comparative examples supplied by Yüksel Sezgin, one sees that women are not sitting quietly on the sidelines in many Islamic reform movements, while Roja Fazaeli's highly personalistic account indicates just how engaged Iranian women are in such attempted reforms.
What binds these essays together, then, are their internal connections: they take the reader from one highly contextualized situation to another, but the elements of power, initiative, and interplay of law and custom run as themes the reader can trace in the course of moving from one circumstantial account to another.
There is more to be said from the perspective of empirical studies than any two collections can possibly embrace. As such work progresses we are beginning to discover, for example, that women who pursue their cases to decision in Muslim family law courts win in the vast majority of instances; that women argue vigorously for their rights when they learn of them; that courts are not always aiming to reach a verdict so much as to place the parties back into negotiating their own problems; and that since local custom is commonly regarded throughout the Muslim world as Islamic, not something set alongside that which is denominated Islamic, no understanding of Islamic law generally can go forward without attending to its implementation on the ground. These two collections of essays will be of great interest to all scholars who seek to understand how this field is unfolding, while comparativists working anywhere in the Muslim world will find here an excellent series of introductions to the actualities of Islamic legal practice in a wide range of geographical and cultural domains.
