Overview

Personal status laws remain a highly politicized area of debate in the Middle East, as the arena in which the contentious issues of women's rights, religion and minority groups meet. This is especially so when it comes to divorce. In Tunisia, with the moderate Islamist party Ennahda winning the first elections following the 2011 revolution, questions of religion in public life have gained greater primacy. The country is often hailed for its progressive personal status code, seen as an exception to the practice in many other Muslim countries. Polygamy is banned, for example, and in divorce cases there is gender equality. However, Tunisia's legal system contains many gaps and leaves much room for interpretation. Bearing in mind this importance of the role of Islam in judicial courts, Maaike Voorhoeve investigates whether the more progressive, and ostensibly secular, principles enshrined in Tunisia's Personal Status Code of 1956 are in fact adhered to in divorce cases. And if not, whether judges frequently turn to the Sharia, custom or societal norms as their primary sources of guidance. Through extensive research in the Tunisian courts, Voorhoeve investigates the different types of divorce, the arguments presented to the court and the consequent legal decisions made. She focuses on the role of female judges, testing the assumption that they adjudicate in a more gender-neutral way and examining the impact they have had on Tunisian legal culture and through this, Tunisian society. Gender and Divorce Law in North Africa therefore sheds light on the wide-reaching debate throughout North Africa and the Middle East concerning the role of Islam and Sharia in the public, political, legal and private spheres. This debate, which often pits secularists against Islamists, but is in reality much more nuanced, is key in a variety of fields, including Middle East studies and Islamic law.

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9781780765297

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Reviews

'Taking the family law courts of Tunisia as her object and focusing on divorce cases, Maaike Voorhoeve gives a nuanced picture of a legal culture and meticulously sets out the various sources of Tunisian law: Sharia, custom and legislation - Within the complexity of the several activities that compose a judgment, the book deals with an issue that is today a fundamental one: gender. Voorhoeve examines this dimension of gender, following the correlations that may exist between the way in which the law is interpreted and the wave of feminization of the judiciary in Tunisia.' - Kmar Bendana, Professor of Contemporary History at the Universite de La Manouba and the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain, Tunisia. 'This is an original work of high academic quality. Those who have researched the Tunisian Code of Personal Status have usually approached the topic either from an exclusively juridical point of view, usually addressing legal practitioners, or they were mainly or exclusively interested in tracing the impact of the classical Sharia. Maaike Voorhoeve has done neither. She has carried out and finished a truly multidisciplinary project in which she critically combined her expertise in law, social sciences and Islamic studies. The result is an excellent study that will be important for students and scholars interested in the application of Tunisian family law, the working of the Tunisian judiciary, gender, and Islam in Tunisia.' - Ruud Peters, Emeritus Professor of Islamic Law, University of Amsterdam

Author Information

Maaike Voorhoeve is Researcher in the Law Faculty at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches Islamic law and family law in the Muslim World and where she also did her PhD in legal anthropology. She is the editor of Family Law in Islam: Divorce, Marriage and Women in the Muslim World (I.B.Tauris, 2012).

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