mirror of Indonesia’s political, cultural, and legal sys-
tems, in American Journal of Comparative Law 23
(1975), 653.
D. S. Lev, Islamic courts in Indonesia. A study in the polit-
ical bases of legal institutions, Berkeley 1972.
M. Nakamura, Divorce in Java. A study of the dissolution
of marriage among Javanese Muslims, Yogyakarta 1983.
N. Noriani Nik Badlishah (ed.) Islamic family law and
justice for Muslim women, Kuala Lumpur 2003.
N. Othman, Grounding human rights arguments in non-
Western culture. Shariaand the citizen rights of women
in a modern Islamic state, in J. R. Bauer and D. A. Bell
(eds.), The East Asian challenge for human rights,
Cambridge 1999, 169–92.
S. Pompe, Mixed marriages in Indonesia. Some comments
on the law and literature, in Bijdragen tot de Taal-,
Land-, en Volkenkunde144 (1988), 259.
S. Pompe and J. Otto, Some comments on recent devel-
opments in the Indonesian marriage law with particu-
lar respect to the rights of women, in Verfassung und
Recht in Ubersee4 (1990), 415–33.
J. Prins, Adatlaw and Muslim religious law in modern
Indonesia, in Welt des Islams1 (1951), 283.
N. Soewondo, Law and the status of women in Indonesia,
in Columbia Human Rights Law Review8 (1976), 123.
——, The Indonesian marriage law and its implementing
regulations, in Archipel13 (1977), 283.
S. Thalib, Indonesian family law [in Indonesian], Jakarta
1974.
S. Tiwon, Indonesia. Early 20th century to present, in
EWIC I, Leiden 2003, 235–8.
C. Vreede-de Stuers, The Indonesian woman. Struggles
and achievements, The Hague 1960.Mark CammackSub-Saharan AfricaIslamic law is an important part of legal thought
and dispute resolution processes in much of Sub-
Saharan Africa. The application and jurisdiction of
Islamic law vis-à-vis other systems of law and social
norms varies tremendously, however. In some
African states, Islamic law constitutes a part of the
official legal system. Elsewhere, Islamic law is not
part of state law but informs local-level dispute res-
olution and influences community moral guidelines
and ethical norms. Most African states that incor-
porate Islamic law into the state legal system do so
only for matters of family law; Islamic legal institu-
tions can therefore be arenas of great importance to
women. In some areas, people refer to Islamic
courts as “women’s courts.”
The spread of Islam into Sub-Saharan Africa
brought important changes regarding law, dispute
resolution, and women’s social, legal, and political
status. In Nigeria, the Islamic court system became
widespread after Usman dan Fodio’s jihad move-
ment of 1804, which overthrew the rule of the
Hausa Emirs and strove to establish a leadership
derived directly from the Sharì≠a. Dan Fodio’s396 law: articulation of islamic and non-islamic systems
daughter, the poet Nana Asma’u, supported his
aims and sought to increase women’s knowledge of
Islamic law to improve their social position (Calla-
way and Creevey 1994).
With the spread of Islam, women sometimes
gained rights and sometimes lost them. Women
often won rights within the family, such as the right
to the custody of children and to marital mainte-
nance. Islamic law brought an increased focus on
the rights of the individual over kin groups, which
affected women’s status through land usage and
inheritance rights. In parts of Nigeria, women spe-
cifically benefited from Islamic inheritance rights
that they had not previously enjoyed (Callaway and
Creevey 1994). Elsewhere, as in eighteenth-century
Sudan, women lost economic advantages when the
adoption of Islamic legal norms influenced family
economies by drawing women away from their
conventional roles in household-level production
(Spaulding 1984).
The relationship between Islamic and customary
law played out differently from place to place. The
distinction between what is appropriately “Islamic”
and what is “customary” is often unclear, and even
members of the same community may differ on this
point. In some parts of Africa, custom was woven
into the fabric of Islam. Elsewhere, distinctly recog-
nized customary legal norms held sway. Among the
Yao of Malawi, for example, Islamic norms regu-
lated marriage, but customary norms of matrilin-
eality controlled inheritance – only occasionally
was wealth distributed to children and spouses
according to Islamic norms (Anderson 1970).
In writing of the relationship between custom
and Islam, some scholars have linked women with
“custom” and men with “Islam.” Eastman sug-
gested that in East Africa, Islamic law was the
domain of men while custom (in Kiswahili mila)
was that of women (1984, 1988; see also Caplan
1982). Other scholars have criticized the assump-
tion of two religio-legal spheres by arguing that
men and women exert considerable influence in
both arenas (Middleton 1992, Caplan 1995).
Hirsch found that Kenyan Swahili women are less
likely than men to move to an Islamic legal dis-
course in framing their disputes for a kadhi’s (qà∂ì)
court, although both men and women will make
use of Islamic discourse (1998).
In the colonial period, European rule brought
changes that affected women’s status through law.
In many areas, Islamic legal institutions were al-
ready established, and colonial governments some-
times kept them in place; Britain, for example, kept
such institutions intact in Nigeria and Zanzibar.
Often, the jurisdiction of Islamic courts was re-