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modern Egypt, Stanford 1968.
Lama Abu-OdehEgyptPrior to the late nineteenth century family law
and family courts, as such, did not exist in Egypt or
anywhere else in the Ottoman Empire. Matters per-
taining to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and cus-
tody, along with criminal and civil matters, were
adjudicated through the Sharì≠a courts on the basis
of Islamic law or, in the case of Christians and Jews,
the milliyya (confessional) courts. Administrative
cases fell under qànùn, or Ottoman executive law.
≠Urf(customary law) played a critical role in legal
practices, influencing local preferences for particu-
lar schools of legal interpretation and strategic
choices by plaintiffs about how and where particu-
lar sorts of cases were raised. In Egypt, the Shàfi≠ì
school was favored in the Delta, reflecting the
prevalence of the extended family with the father as
head of household. In Upper Egypt, the preference
was for the Màlikìschool, which reflected the
prevalence of tribal kinship models, stressing the
authority of male members of the wider clan, from
father to clan head. Decisions by jurists were inter-
pretive, based on the practice of referencing and
interpreting texts, rather than on codes promul-
gated by the governing authority.
The notion of family relationships as based upon
complementary, rather than equal, rights between
men and women was foundational to such legal
interpretations. The law upheld the authority of
men as fathers and husbands with proprietary
rights over women and younger family members,
based on their status as financial providers to the
household. In return for the right to maintenance,
a woman owed obedience (†à≠a) to her husband and
egypt 463father. In practice, however, the fluid nature of
adjudication often worked in the interests of women,
who used the court system regularly as a way to
assert their legal rights. The legal system, therefore,
often honored a woman’s right to choose a hus-
band, to enter marriage as a propertied person, to
demand adequate support for herself and to nego-
tiate a divorce on her own initiative. Such courts,
which were authorized to adjudicate the cases of all
parties who came before them, were patronized not
only by Muslims but also by Christians seeking to
gain divorces or register marriages that would then
follow the principles of Sharì≠alaw.
Egyptian legal reforms of the late nineteenth cen-
tury drastically altered the terrain of law and adju-
dication. In 1883, one year after the British had
occupied Egypt, a Civil Code based on Napoleonic
law was compiled by the colonial administration
for the new national (ahliyya) courts. These assumed
jurisdiction over criminal and commercial matters.
Matters related to marriage, divorce, custody,
guardianship, and inheritance remained the judi-
cial province of the Sharì≠a and milliyyacourts.
Confining Sharì≠a to domestic matters politicized
the family as both a sphere of intimate, affective
relations and as a repository of group identity of
which religious affiliation was a defining legal and
moral characteristic. The politicization of what
have come to be known as personal status laws
(a™wàl shakhßiyya) emerged from the intersection
of European colonial discourses on domesticity and
the primacy of the nuclear family as a hallmark of
modernity and anti-colonial nationalist discourses.
Egyptian secular nationalist as well as Islamic
reformers targeted the family as a site for reforms
which aimed both to make Egypt more modern and
to preserve a distinctive national culture.
The Muslim personal status laws of 1920, 1923,
and 1929 codified and rationalized the rules gov-
erning family law. A committee made up of reli-
gious leaders incorporated rules from the various
madhàhibto create a single, unified body of law
and procedure, which was then reviewed by the
minister of justice and approved by the prime min-
ister. Such reforms institutionalized the authority of
religious officials, underpinned by the sanction of
secular state institutions, to legally regulate the
shape and content of the family.
Legal reforms raised the minimum age of marriage,
made state registration of marriage a requirement
and rationalized male divorce pronouncements
(†alàq). Amendments laid out provisions for judicial
divorce by the wife on the basis of ∂araror harm,
making marital discord (shiqàq) grounds for divorce.
In spite of the very different status of marriage