94 Islam and Modernity
Moaddel (1998) argued, for instance, that post-colonial secular states acting as
authoritarian ideological apparatuses monopolised culture production and, by
eliminating pluralism, ultimately sowed the seeds of Islamic fundamentalisms
(see also Hatem 1994). The experience of political modernisation was itself
riddled with contradictions. One of the glaring fault lines in modern conceptions
of citizenship in most Muslim societies was evident in the denial of full juridical
status to women, who remained wards of their male kin with respect to some
of the most fundamental rights in their persons: to marry, to work, to travel, or
to be able to retain custody of their children upon divorce (Joseph 2000). Thus,
personal-status codes derived from sharia law routinely curtail and contradict
the stipulations of equality embodied in most national constitutions.^8
A related line of argumentation concerns the transformations that the sharia
itself underwent when it became subject to procedures standard to Western
legislative enactment in the process of modernisation. Some suggest that the
fl exibility and fl uidity attributed to Islamic law before codifi cation by modern
states were lost with the move to modern legislation (Messick 1993; Asad 2003:
227–8). The implications of this move for women’s rights have, likewise, received
mixed interpretations. Although the main thrust of family-law reform in the
twentieth century was in the direction of protecting women’s rights in the con-
jugal union (by setting minimum ages for marriage, ensuring women’s consent,
making unilateral divorce and polygyny procedurally more diffi cult, extending
women’s custody rights over children and strengthening conjugal ties at the
expense of male agnates), some scholars have argued that sharia law, as codifi ed
and applied by modern states, has congealed and consolidated many aspects of
male privilege. Amira Sonbol (2003), for instance, has argued that, in the case
of Jordan, selective borrowing from Hanafi and Maliki jurisprudence resulted in
a modernised code combining the most patriarchal prescriptions of each school
of law (see also Tucker 1998; Moors 1999; Mir-Hosseini 2000). Furthermore,
far from being a narrative of steady progress towards the liberalisation of sharia,
family legislation in the twentieth century was marked by repeated (and success-
ful) attempts to roll back the modest gains women had achieved. The contempo-
rary histories of Iran, Egypt and Algeria provide ample illustration of this point
(Paidar 1995; Sonbol 1996; Hatem 2000; Lazreg 2000).
A third strand of scholarship draws its inspiration from post-structuralist and
post-colonial critiques of modernity. Without denying the fact that women may
be included in society and public life in totally novel ways, some scholars express
scepticism concerning the progressive claims of modernity with reference to
women’s emancipation (see, for example, the essays in Abu-Lughod 1998). This
writing draws attention to the politics of modernity as a regulatory discourse
creating new forms of subjection and exclusion. Thus, attempts to ‘modernise’
women may contain both emancipatory and disciplinary elements, especially in
contexts where encounters with the West single women out as the repositories of