The Role of Women in Marriage as Seen by three Salafis: Obstacles, Rights, and Duties The past century has witnessed dynamic debates about the role of women in family law among Arab Muslims throughout the Middle East and North Africa. These debates started as early as the nineteenth century and were led by the Egyptian scholar Mu?ammad ‘Abdu. During the twentieth century, after gaining independence, many Arab states codified their Islamic family law. Others maintained the Islamic family law as part of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Numerous Arab Muslim scholars have written on the topic of family law, including the rights and duties of women. This paper, however, is one of the first to present Salafi’s opinions on the role of women in the Islamic marriage contract. In this paper, I chose three prominent individuals from three different Arab states within the Salafi movement; the Egyptian scholar Rash?d Ri??, the Saudi muft? Ibn al-?Uthaym?n, and the Moroccan scholar ‘All?l al-F?s?. In this paper, I juxtapose their different opinions and show the evidence they provide on the role of the woman in her marriage; specifically in regard to being coerced to marry, the role of the marriage guardian (wal?), the age of marriage (bul?gh), and the woman’s duties and responsibilities within the household. More importantly, I demonstrate that, despite the perception that the Salafi movement is ultra-conservative in regard to women, these three individuals have opinions that vary from conservative to liberal, from restricting the role of women in marriage to granting them complete freedom in their contract, and that are internally inconsistent.

‘Urfi (or secret) marriages in Egypt occupy a liminal legal space in three regards. First, the parties to these unions are at once married but unmarried. While they believe they are married in the eyes of God, Muslim youths involved in ‘urfi marriages do not cohabit and members of their communities do not acknowledge or enforce the rights and responsibilities that come with their new social roles. Second, the marriages themselves are at once secret and public. Couples hide their nuptials from parents and community members, but they must disclose the ‘urfi marriage to a few trusted contacts for practical reasons (to secure witnesses to the marriage contract, for instance). Third, ‘urfi marriages are at once regulated and unregulated. They are established by marriage contracts that are not registered with the state. However, when disputes over paternity or divorce arise, the aggrieved party may now take the informal marriage contract to court and seek intervention. This paper explores how ordinary people involved in ‘urfi marriages navigate this liminal space, and in particular, how they appropriate and reinterpret formal law and legal practices. It analyzes data obtained from semi-structured interviews with 40 young men and women from Cairo and Minya who were involved in ‘urfi unions. As such, it is the first full-length study of ‘urfi marriage that draws on interviews conducted with individuals who have actually entered into such unions. I first describe several informal legal practices that are informed by lay understandings of shari‘a and the Egyptian Personal Status code. For instance, many couples who want to terminate ‘urfi marriages rip up the marriage contract (sometimes unilaterally by the woman), and thus consider themselves to be divorced. Other couples report having gone to lawyers who promised to ‘register’ their marriages in the civil registry office (usually at the insistence of the bride, who views this as a form of protection). I argue here that such informal practices, while technically not legal, have the same influence as formal law in governing behavior and social relations because they appear to be valid those involved, all of whom ascribe great power and prestige to formal law. I also argue, however, that while men and women do not appear to differ in terms of their formal legal consciousness, incomplete or inaccurate understandings of formal law have more deleterious consequences for women than they do for men involved in ‘urfi unions.

Islamic law (shari`a) has traditionally upheld a gender-differentiated doctrine of marriage, whereby Muslim men are permitted to marry non-Muslim women, but Muslim women are prohibited from marrying non-Muslim men. This classical doctrine continues to be maintained in mainstream contemporary Muslim religious discourse. Yet, neither the scriptural foundations nor the rational arguments supporting this doctrine has received little sustained scholarly analysis. This dearth is consequential given the contemporary context, in which many Muslims live as minorities in Western societies, making intra-communal marriage more challenging. The classical juristic permission for Muslim males to “marry out” in these minority contexts leaves scores of observant Muslim women with only two viable options: to remain unmarried and forego the benefits of companionship, children and sexual intimacy, or to themselves “marry out” of the religion and face ostracization and/or moral anxiety. The gender-differentiated doctrine of marriage thus creates disproportionate hardship for Muslim women in minority or multi-religious contexts, and merits interrogation. The objective of this paper is to investigate the arguments used to support this gendered doctrine as presented primarily in contemporary religious advice texts that address marriage between Muslims and People of the Book (Jews or Christians). Key scriptural texts – relevant Qur’anic verses and Prophetic ?ad?ths – as well as the acts and opinions of early religious authorities may also be reviewed, as they are important both to contemporary traditionalist discourses that support this gendered doctrine, as well as to emerging Islamic feminist discourses that might seek to revise it. The primary research languages will be English and Arabic. Some of the texts and/or themes that I hope to address are the following: pertinent Qur’anic verses (such as 5:5 and 2:221) and interpretations of key concepts like mu’min, k?fir, mushrik, and ahl al-kit?b therein; legal and biographical reports of intercommunal marriage among the Prophetic and Companions; traditional assumptions of both religious hierarchy of Islam over other religions and gender hierarchy of husbands over wives; concerns for the religious identity and practice of Muslim wives and children in intercommunal marriages, versus that of Muslim men in the same; arguments based on gender-differentiated notions of sexuality and psychology, such that men’s need for men to marry is given greater weight that women’s.

Campaigns for equal citizenship rights in Iran, such as One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws, have received considerable attention both in Iran and internationally. These campaigns have drawn attention to how discriminatory laws, with respect to citizenship and nationality, prevent women from enjoying their constitutional rights as citizens. Stories about hardship caused by women’s legal incapacity to pass on citizenship to their children or to obtain residence permits for their spouses appear frequently in the newspapers. The frequency and regularity of these stories in newspapers and the popularity of campaigns for equal rights point to the salience of this issue in Iran, not only because Iran has a huge diaspora population all over the world, but also because Iran is one of the top refugee-receiving countries in the world. Until recently, citizenship problems were cast aside by the government as an ‘upper-class’ problem of Iran’s diasporic community. However, in the past two decades, a large number of Iranian women, primarily from low socio-economic background have married refugee men in Iran. What has the struggle for full citizenship meant for these Iranian women married to Afghan refugees? Not being able to pass citizenship, their children are not eligible for basic rights to birth certificates or schooling. Their husbands do not receive residence permits, and thus these Iranian wives must either move to Afghanistan, or divorce their husbands and surrender their children to them. The uncertain future of these families has magnified the unequal status of female citizens in Iran and has and served as an impetus for change in Iranian citizenship laws. The paper will explore the way citizenship is gendered in Iran, through the experience of Iranian women married to Afghan refugees and the legal framework that structures their lives. After examining how citizenship in general is gendered, the paper will examine the formal legal framework in the Iranian context that produces different relationships of women and men to the law and practices of citizenship in the state. These differential relationships to the state are highlighted in the complex interaction between citizenship, gender, and refugee policy that has shaped the lived realities of Iranian women.

This paper examines Reverend Henry Harris Jessup’s Fifty-three Years in Syria, reading Jessup through the broader framework of tropes of Christian manhood to look at the ways Protestantism structured specifically gendered power relationships between Protestant missionaries like Jessup, and native Syrian men, and to locate how the cultural and social dimensions of Protestantism served to construct ideal manhood in 19th century Syria. These issues are discussed against the backdrop of an expansionary Protestant evangelical missionary movement driven by new conceptions of Christian manhood and budding American imperial interests in the Middle East during the early 20th century. The changes in local culture that accompanied Protestant conversion in the 19th and 20th century Middle East have been a prominent topic of scholarly focus recently. This work has established the influence of Protestant missionary women on local domestic life and conceptions of modernity through their engagement with native women. Less attention has been given to the nuances of the relationship between Protestant missionary and local men, and the ways Protestantism may have compelled native males into new ways of conceiving of themselves as men within their families, cultures and societies. Likewise, the linkages between missionary work and imperialism have been examined closely, particularly in studies of the British empire, while scholarship on the relationship between American Protestant missionaries and the emergence of American imperialism in the Middle East remains less developed. This paper argues that Jessup’s personal understanding of Christian manhood helped to shape gendered power structures and emerging notions of ideal manhood and modernity in turn of the century Syria. Jessup’s ideal manhood consisted of a sliding scale of qualities. Native men from different religious communities and walks of life could exhibit most of them or just a few, allowing Jessup to form respectful relationships with non-Christians, while reserving the ultimate embodiment of ideal manhood for white Protestant men and their native convert protégés. Jessup’s conception of ideal masculinity came to be broadly influential in Syrian society in the 20th century due to the Protestant role in constructing modernity through missionary educational institutions. Protestant models of modernity were lent authority by the growing presence of American power in the region, which allowed missionaries like Jessup to impose specific ideas about domesticity, intellectualism, and taste, on Syrian society, and to police modernity by including and excluding native men based on their adherence to an ideal standard of Christian manhood.