Islamic family law and international legal norms in the Arab world

Prof. Dr. Bettina Dennerlein

Bettina Dennerlein is Professor on Gender Studies and Islamic Studies at the Department of Orientalism at the University of Zurich. She received her Ph.D. in 1997 from the Free University in Berlin and researched at the Van Leer-Jerusalem-Institute and at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) in Paris. Since April 2000 she was Research Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and at the Humboldt University in Berlin. From April 2007 until February 2009 she was Professor at the Asia-Africa-Institute at the University of Hamburg.

Selected Publications

South-South Linkages in Islam, (2007), in: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27, 1, Durham: Duke University Press (with Dietrich Reetz, Guest Editors).

Islamisches Recht und sozialer Wandel in Algerien. Zur Entwicklung des Personalstatuts seit 1962 (1998), Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag.

Religiöse Tradition und Staatsbildung in Marokko, (forthcoming), in: M. Dabag (Hrsg.) Islam und moderner Nationalstaat, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.

South-South Linkages and Social Change. Moroccan Perspectives on Army Reform in the Muslim Mediterranean (Nineteenth Century) (2007), in: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27.1, 52-61

Legalizing’ the Family. Disputes about Marriage, Paternity and Divorce in Algerian Courts (1963-1990), (2001), in: Continuity and Change, 16, 1, pp. 243-261.

Islamic family law and international legal norms in the Arab world

Historically speaking, Islamic family law as it is understood and applied today is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its origins in the Arab world go back to the colonial era. While during a first period, changes in this realm of law were rather indirect and most of the time limited to procedural matters, its conceptualization and its broader social meaning started to change significantly. Since the end of the nineteenth century, marriage and the nuclear family started to be considered the basic unit of the umma and successively became the site of public discourse and particular state policies. This conceptual shift partly enhanced the role of women as wives and mothers. At the same time, in the course of the political and legal reconfiguration of marriage and the family, the hierarchical relationship between the sexes sanctioned by traditional Islamic jurisprudence was tuned in to modern notions of biologically based sexual difference and, at the same time, to notions of the nation and of moral as well as of social progress. It was the reformist nationalist paradigm that informed the first wave of post-independence codifications of Muslim family law in the Arab world and the political discourses that accompanied it. Yet, since the 1980es, questions of family law reform are increasingly formulated in the language of human rights and linked to the broader international debate about women’s rights as human rights. Taking Morocco as an example, the paper will analyze the dynamics of changing normative paradigms with respect to Islamic family law and discuss some of its consequences.