Refashioning the Shari‘a Courts in the Semi-colonial Period

Refashioning the Shari‘a Courts in the Semi-colonial Period

Department

History Department

Abstract

This paper uses the recently unearthed Egyptian court registers of the revamped Islamic religious (shari‘a) legal system to explore the ways in which men and women understood their legal rights and duties in marriage, divorce, and the family during a wave of legal reforms between 1897 and 1931. It examines a sample of personal status cases filed in the Cairo Shari‘a Court in order to situate them within the widespread press debates over the role the completely reorganized and revamped—albeit more bureaucratized and hierarchical—Islamic courts should play. This paper argues that they resulted in a comprehensive transformation that centralized, formalized, and enlarged the role these courts played in the familial and national lives of Egyptians. This paper not only reflects on the use of shari‘a records as a source for both legal and social history but also argues that scholars of the courts must transcend the theoretical and methodological divide between academic works that rely primarily on periodicals, and hence marginalize the illiterate masses, and those that make use of court records and rarely situate their litigants and personnel beyond the walls of the courtroom. By merging court records with press sources, this paper aims to produce a more nuanced conceptualization of early twentieth-century Egyptian history while also demonstrating discrepancies as well as convergences between legal practices and social perceptions of marriage and family, on the one hand, and the law, the courts, and the state, on the other hand.

Publication Date

3-1-2024

Document Type

Book Chapter

Book Title

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History

ISBN

9780190072742

Publisher

Oxford University Press

City

New York

First Page

284

Last Page

298

Keywords

shari‘a courts, marriage, family, legal system, twentieth-century legal history

Disciplines

History

Refashioning the Shari‘a Courts in the Semi-colonial Period

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