Family and the Courts in Modern Egypt: A Study based on Decisions by the Shari a Courts, 1900-1955.

AuthorZiadeh, Farhat J.
PositionReview

By RON SHAHAM. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1997. Pp. xi + 236, appendix, bibliography, glossary, index. HFl 166, $103.75.

For some time now, several scholars of Islamic law and modern reform have felt the need for a study of how the personal-status reforms of the twenties and forties of this century in Egypt, so ably described in theory by J. N. D. Anderson and others, have fared at the hands of courts, legal practitioners, and the population at large. They wanted to know how the qadis, or shari a judges, so loyal to the holy shari a, applied in actual cases mundane reforms, understandably clothed in Islamic legitimacy. They also wanted to know how the general public, who were used to their time-honored customs and practices, took to the reforms that in effect raised the age of marriage, altered the laws of divorce in favor of women, and made other changes in inheritance entitlements. That need by scholars has now been satisfied to a considerable extent by this book which, in its original form, was written in Hebrew as a Ph.D. dissertation at the Hebrew University, and later recast in English. The book stops at the year 1955 because the shari a courts were integrated then in the national courts and the qadis were no longer a separate body of judges.

Ideally, such a study would require that the researcher examine the files of cases in Egyptian shari a courts, but the vastness of such an enterprise is beyond the capabilities of a single individual; hence dependence was placed on two journals which reported on personal-status cases decided by the shari a courts, namely Majallat al-Ahkam al-Shar iya and al-Muhamat al-Shar iya, which the author perused at the Tubingen Library. The author, of course, is well aware of the shortcomings of such sources. He says that the waqa i or "protocol" of cases are too concise to give a full background of the dispute, that cases chosen for report represent the criteria and priorities of the editors, and that the quantity of cases reported cannot serve as a statistically representative sample. Still, what we have is a fair selection of cases that can answer most of the questions researchers pose.

In his foreword to this work, Aharon Layish, who supervised the original dissertation, summed up its main thesis as "the extent to which the legal reform is implemented or circumvented in day-to-day reality, and the role of the qadis in this process." In his analysis the author attempted to place his findings within the...

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