This talk explores the politics of family in the late Ottoman Empire by looking at Ottoman administration’s initiatives to reform the Islamic family law during the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918). After the formation of a codified Islamic civil code, Mecelle (1869-1876), the continuing efforts by the Ottoman reformers to streamline the religious laws resulted in the codification of Islamic family law with a decree on the family law (Hukuk-i Aile Kararnamesi) in 1917. Although it was rescinded after Ottoman Empire’s defeat in the WWI in 1919, the decree paved the way towards the creation of a secular civil law in Turkey (Swiss civil code was adopted by the new Turkish regime in 1926). I take this crucial historical episode to question what the codification of Islamic family law came to stand for, by analyzing how this law-making attended to the issues of divorce, polygyny, parental rights or childhood vis-à-vis the Islamic legal tradition. As to better understand how the reform efforts by Ottoman regime speak to the late Ottoman public intellectual discussions I also focus on growing popular discourses on monogamy, nuclear family, conjugal love and the upbringing of ‘moral national citizens.’ I therefore examine Young Turk policies on family in order to explore the ambivalent role the modern state played in maintaining Sharia as a ‘civilized law’ for keeping public morality up, and in promoting new national family values. Based on my research on archival documents and intellectual works, I elucidate the social and political repercussions of these reforms within the background of an emergent ‘Ottoman-Turkish secularism.’ This talk therefore examines in what ways the modern reconfigurations of Islamic family law as a ‘private law,’ unlike its status in the Islamic legal tradition, rendered it instrumental for the Ottoman state in remaking and supervising the national family on moral ends. Such an inquiry not only helps us to comprehend why and in what ways ‘modern governmentalities’ targeted family as their object of regulation but also gives us a historical ground for approaching the long term anxieties and aspirations of the state over the family in modern Turkey.

This paper will examine strategies that Palestinian women used in court as they sought to secure their interests in wife-initiated divorce cases from the 1920s and 1930s Jerusalem Shari’a Court. Additionally, it draws on interviews with Palestinian women seniors to provide insight regarding their perceptions of Muslim family law, their legal status, and the importance of women’s awareness of their rights. The high number of wife-initiated divorce cases during this part of the Mandate period in itself exemplifies Kandioyti’s concept of patriarchal bargaining, which describes circumstances in which women are able to benefit in some respect by negotiating within a male-privileged system. But while these women were able to obtain divorces, wife-initiated divorce was (and is) not the ideal divorce situation for a woman. This is primarily because women nearly always had to give up their financial divorce rights when they initiated it, particularly the deferred dower and maintenance during the waiting period, and they often gave up child support as well. And the fact many women began their divorce proceedings as maintenance cases suggests that it was challenging for women to convince their husbands to divorce even under these conditions. But my findings demonstrate that female plaintiffs were able to maneuver within the court system to some extent by means of legal strategies. One notable tactic was the woman volunteering to pay child support in order to obtain a divorce from her husband, but returning to court and requesting child support after the divorce. Perhaps the most common device was beginning her divorce case by requesting maintenance in court. This gave a woman an excuse to drag her husband into court if he was unwilling to agree to divorce, and in many cases she was then able to persuade him to consent to it. Expanding on the scholarship that demonstrates Palestinian women were historically active participants in the shari’a court system, this paper analyzes women’s strategic negotiations and the circumstances under which they tended to succeed in wife-initiated divorce cases from the 1920s-1930s Jerusalem Shari’a Court. The cases also convey some ways in which Palestinians felt and thought about family law during this period. In particular, my interviews with Palestinian seniors citizens (or non-citizens rather) shed light on how Palestinians perceived their roles and obligations within the family and their gendered rights.

In November 2016, the Lebanese media reported the story of a Shi‘i woman sent to jail for refusing to give up custody of her three-year-old child. The prison sentence was based on a judgment issued by a Shi‘i family court stating that the women’s youngest child shall live under the custody of his father until puberty. The news provoked a tide of moral outrage across the country; protests and sits in were organized. Such waves of protest are hardly new in Lebanon: three years before (in October 2013) Lebanese citizens hit the street demanding that Shi‘i divorced mothers be allowed to keep custody of their children for a longer period. “You can’t take my children in the name of religion,” read the placard of a female protestor. This legal campaign was directly inspired by the success of Sunni Lebanese activists in reforming the custody laws of their co-religionists. In 2012, indeed, the legal period during which divorced women retain custody of their children was extended from five to twelve years. To this day, however, Shi‘i Lebanese have been unable to implement such reform; as a result, women therefore regularly lose the custody of their children after two years. Based on multi-year ethnographic research, this paper compares the recent campaigns undertaken by Sunnis and Shi‘i Lebanese to extend the duration of maternal custody. The inquiry is based on fieldwork observations (court audiences, NGO debates), interviews (with activists, litigants, judges and lawyers) and a study of legal cases. Why, I ask, can two parallel campaigns around the same issue, launched in the same years and in the same country produce such contrasting results? But instead of approaching this question through a study of Shi‘i and Sunni legal traditions, I turn my glaze toward the political and legal system in which these traditions are currently embedded. Investigating the contemporary mechanics of Islamic law, I argue, requires paying attention to a larger set of institutions, offices, and networks, such as ministers, MPs, secular activists, NGOs, and civil judges. Only by being attentive to a broader range of legal rules and norms, I suggest, can we come to an understanding of what Islamic law has become in our contemporary societies.