Ziba Mir-Hosseini is a legal anthropologist. A professorial research associate at the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, SOAS, University of London, she is founding member of Musawah: Global Movement for Equality in Muslim Family Laws, and the convenor of its knowledge-building initiative to rethink the notion of male authority in Muslim family laws. Among her books are: Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco (IB Tauris, 1993), Islam and Gender: The Contemporary Religious Debate in Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999), Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law: Justice and Ethics in the Islamic Legal Tradition (co-edited, I. B. Tauris, 2013). She has also co-directed two award-winning documentaries: Divorce Iranian Style (1999) and Runaway (2000).
Al-Sharmani, MulkiMulki Al-Sharmani is Academy of Finland research fellow and lecturer, Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, and research coordinator of the Musawah knowledge-building initiative to rethink the notion of male authority in Muslim family laws. Her research interests include Muslim family laws, Islamic feminism, gender, migration and transnationalism. She is the editor of Feminist Activism: Women's Rights and Legal Reform (ZED Books, forthcoming 2014), and her Egyptian Muslim Family Laws: Legal Reforms and Gender Justice is under consideration for publication.
Rumminger, JanaJana Rumminger currently lives in Singapore and works with Musawah, the global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. Her focus is on issues related to reform of Muslim family laws and implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). After graduating from Northeastern University School of Law, Jana spent a year as a Luce Scholar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where she worked on advocacy and law reform at a local NGO, Women's Aid Organization. She then served as programme officer with International Women's Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific, an international NGO that works for the realization of women's human rights through the lens of CEDAW and other international human rights instruments. She graduated from Princeton University in 1997 and earned an MS in Law, Policy and Society concurrently with her law degree at Northeastern.
Foreword
Zainah Anwar
Acknowledgements
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction
Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger
Muslim Legal Tradition and the Challenge of Gender Equality
Ziba Mir-Hosseini
The Interpretive Legacy of Qiwamah as an Exegetical Construct
Omaima Abou-Bakr
An Egalitarian Reading of the Concepts of Khilafah, Wilayah and Qiwamah
Asma Lamrabet
Producing Gender-Egalitarian Islamic Law: A Case Study of Guardianship (Wilayah) in Prophetic Practice
Ayesha S. Chaudhry
Islamic Law, Sufism and Gender: Rethinking the Terms of the Debate
Sa'diyya Shaikh
Qiwamah and Wilayah as Legal Postulates in Muslim Family Laws
Lynn Welchman
Islamic Law Meets Human Rights: Reformulating Qiwamah and Wilayah for Personal Status Law Reform Advocacy in Egypt
Marwa Sharafeldin
'Men are the Protectors and Maintainers of Women...': Three Fatwas on Spousal Roles and Rights
Lena Larsen
Understanding Qiwamah and Wilayah through Life Stories
Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger
The Ethics of Tawhid over the Ethics of Qiwamah
Amina Wadud
About the Contributors
Index
Both Muslims and non-Muslims see women in most Muslim countries as suffering from social, economic, and political discrimination, treated by law and society as second-class citizens subject to male authority. This discrimination is attributed to Islam and Islamic law, and since the late 19th century there has been a mass of literature tackling this issue.
Recently, exciting new feminist research has been challenging gender discrimination and male authority from within Islamic legal tradition: this book presents some important results from that research. The contributors all engage critically with two central juristic concepts; rooted in the Qur'an, they lie at the basis of this discrimination. One refers to a husband's authority over his wife, his financial responsibility toward her, and his superior status and rights. The other is male family members' right and duty of guardianship over female members (e.g., fathers over daughters when entering into marriage contracts) and the privileging of fathers over mothers in guardianship rights over their children.
The contributors, brought together by the Musawah global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family, include Omaima Abou-Bakr, Asma Lamrabet, Ayesha Chaudhry, Sa'diyya Shaikh, Lynn Welchman, Marwa Sharefeldin, Lena Larsen and Amina Wadud.