articulate principles of family law, Islamic, custom-
ary, and Christian, in the Marriage Act of 1971.
The act set the minimum age of marriage for both
girls and boys, and respected customary marriages
by acknowledging both monogamous and polyga-
mous marriage. Certain provisions in the act can be
read as an attempt by President Nyerere to quell
religious controversy in Tanzania by accommodat-
ing the needs of a religiously plural population.
Although it is part of Tanzania, this act does not
affect Zanzibar, where few provisions have been
made in either the colonial or independence periods
for customary law. Anderson argued that this was
because mila, which he translates as customary
law, was already infused with Shàfi≠ìIslamic legal
ideas, and thus was not in contradiction with
Islamic law and needed no separate recognition
(1955). In Zanzibar today, Islamic courts have
jurisdiction over all family and personal status law
and Islamic law remains essentially uncodified.
Throughout Africa today, women are faced with
multiple legal options, some formal and some
informal, and they make decisions influenced by
family members, the perceived likelihood of a par-
ticular outcome in a particular venue, and potential
stigma associated with a particular legal option. A
woman’s socioeconomic status and education
affects her litigation strategies, and her social net-
works influence how she learns about and uses
legal forums. The status of customary vis-à-vis
other types of law remains an important issue
throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly con-
cerning gender and women’s rights. A famous
Kenyan case that favored customary law illustrates
this. In the 1980s, a widow named Wambui Otieno
was vying with her deceased husband’s clan for the
right to bury his body. Because no written law
applied, the Kenyan courts decided that customary
law must be followed, and the deceased’s clan was
given the right to bury the body.
The anthropologist S. E. Merry has pointed out
that the existence of different fields of law is partic-
ularly important to women when there is a result-
ing variation in the way in which areas of women’s
rights are defined – as in marriage, divorce, inheri-
tance, property, and child custody (1982). In Zan-
zibar, many women feel that times have changed
for the better because women today have easier
access to legal means for resolving disputes.Bibliography
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and Society16:41 (Summer 1991), 808–45.Erin E. StilesTurkeyTurkey is unique in the Muslim world with re-
spect to the extent and progressive nature of Family
Code reforms affecting women’s lives. The found-
ing of the Turkish Republic in 1923 brought an end
to the Ottoman Empire’s system of parallel laws
and established a single, secular, and standardized
judicial system adapted from the European system
of law. The introduction in 1926 of the Turkish
Civil Code, adapted from the Swiss Civil Code,
was a major success of the reformists against the
conservative forces defending the Islamic Family
Code. The new Civil Code abolished polygyny and
granted women equal rights in matters of divorce,
child custody, and inheritance. However, to this
day, customary and religious practices continue
to be more influential in the daily lives of millions
of women in Turkey than the Civil Code; this is
especially the case for women living in eastern
Turkey.