within Coptic law, which recognized marriage as a
holy sacrament sanctified by God rather than as a
contract between two people, contemporaneous
changes in Coptic family law mirrored the general
trends toward reform in the Muslim personal sta-
tus laws. Such reforms were, in part, the result of
an intensive campaign by the Egyptian Feminist
Union, which had placed modification of the per-
sonal status laws at the top of its reform agenda.
After an unsuccessful attempt in 1923 to gain
voting rights for women, the union turned its atten-
tion to improving the status of women within the
family. While the campaign was a partial success,
the union was unsuccessful in securing the aboli-
tion of polygamy and its demand that all divorces
be subject to judicial approval.
The codification of family law established the
gendered roles of mother and wife and husband
and father as a legal basis of personhood (ashkhàß)
and citizenship upon which rights and duties were
placed. These rights and duties mirrored not only
the position of women in the family but also their
status within the nation. Husbands and fathers
enjoyed absolute rights to guardianship, divorce,
and custody, while wives and mothers had to peti-
tion the court to achieve their rights, constituting
them as legal dependents of the state. Legally
speaking, men, as enfranchised political individuals,
could make claims to rights as equal, autonomous
individuals. Women, however, had to make claims
for rights on the basis that they were mothers of the
future generation of Egyptian citizens. This model
of maternal citizenship enabled feminists to be par-
tially successful in their calls for changes to family
law as well as to successfully claim the right to be
educated, but circumscribed the other sorts of
demands for rights and inclusion.
While such rights and duties recognized generally
prevailing social norms, which viewed men and
women as having complementary (and unequal)
roles within Egyptian society, the recognition of
women as legal individuals with rights that had to
be protected was new. Thus, the personal status
code laid out the conditions through which women
could obtain a divorce, receive support from their
husbands, retain custody of their children, and con-
test marriages concluded by their male guardians
without their consent. It was precisely this recogni-
tion of rights, however, which constituted women
as dependent legal subjects and emphasized male
familial authority. As wives and mothers, women
were entitled to economic support in exchange for
obedience and freedom from ∂arar, while unilat-
eral divorce was rigidly enshrined as a male pre-464 law: modern family law, 1800–present
rogative. At the same time, the legal delineation of
the conditions under which both husbands and
wives could obtain a divorce privileged new notions
of companionate marriage based on the authority
of the male breadwinner at the expense of wider
male kin and may actually have made divorce more
difficult to obtain for both parties. Such a vision of
marriage was reflective of relatively new notions of
domesticity that favored the bourgeois nuclear
family as the linchpin of the Egyptian nation and
the foundation of its moral, social, and political
order.
These laws remained virtually unchanged until
the 1970s despite changes in the structure of the
Egyptian court system. In 1955, the Sharì≠a and
other confessional courts were abolished by the
Nasser regime as a means to bring religious com-
munities more firmly under the control of the state.
A new family court was established within the
existing national court system. While this may have
undermined the control that religious community
leaders had exercised over women through the
autonomous confessional courts, the preservation
of the existing personal status laws meant that the
gender inequalities remained.
It is these inequalities that made reform of
the personal status laws a particular target of the
Egyptian women’s organizations, starting in the
1920s. Reform campaigns have achieved some fem-
inist demands (such as raising the age of marriage
and raising the age of ™a∂àna, the period in which
the mother has rights to custody over her children)
but have failed to achieve other chief feminist
demands such as abolition of polygamy or restrict-
ing male right to divorce by making it subject to a
judge’s approval. In part, difficulties have stemmed
from the monopolization by religious authorities of
family law and attempts to preserve the family as a
site of cultural authenticity against perceptions of
Western encroachment. But difficulties have also
derived from the state’s attempts to claim sover-
eignty over women’s issues beginning in the 1950s
with the Nasser regime’s program of state femi-
nism. In 1979, President Anwar Sadat passed a
number of reforms to Egypt’s family law by execu-
tive decree after they failed to be ratified in the
Egyptian parliament. Named for Sadat’s wife,
“Jihan’s Law,” as it came to be popularly known,
gave wives the right to keep the marital home in the
event of a divorce and the right to be informed and
granted a divorce if their husbands took another
wife. The law was widely criticized, not only by
Islamists who argued that the changes were con-
trary to Sharì≠a but by other leftist and secular