Reform of Egyptian Personal Status Law and Women(<Special Issue>Islam and Religious Studies)

Abstract

This paper deals with the reform of Egyptian personal status law. In Islam, Islamic law concerns the total life of Muslims. It deals with not only religious acts but also secular acts of Muslims. In Islamic countries like Egypt, Islamic law worked as a positive law before the modern era, but under imperialism, it was transplanted by modern Western laws in the late 19th century. However, personal status law is the only area in which Islamic law is still used. Since traditional Islamic law gives men prerogatives such as the right to divorce his wife without her consent or existence, or to have more than one wife, Egyptian personal status law (which is greatly influenced by traditional Islamic law) became a subject for reform. In the modern era, reformers such as Qasim Amin or Huda Sha'rawi tried to change such prerogatives of men, but they did not succeed. Although one of the biggest reform law (no.44 of 1979) limited the men's exclusive rights of divorce and polygamy, it created a big dispute in the country and finally, in deference to religious activism, the Constitutional Court ruled it was unlawful on procedural grounds. The government then replaced the 1979 ruling with law no.100 of 1985. The latest reform was law no.1 of 2000 which allows a woman to divorce her husband without his approval. This paper tries to show how the reform was made and how it has affected Egyptian society.