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Many contemporary Muslim family laws rest on patriarchal concepts. The time for change is now.
About the author
Ziba Mir-Hosseini is Professorial Research Associate at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, SOAS, University of London. A legal anthropologist, specialising in Islamic law, gender and development, she is a founding member of Musawah Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family. Her previous publications include Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Islam and Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition.
Mulki Al-Sharmani is Academy of Finland research fellow and lecturer, Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, and research coordinator of the Musawah knowledge-building initiative to rethink the notion of male authority in Muslim family laws. Her research interests include Muslim family laws, Islamic feminism, gender, migration and transnationalism. She is the editor of Feminist Activism: Women’s Rights and Legal Reform (ZED Books, forthcoming 2014), and her Egyptian Muslim Family Laws: Legal Reforms and Gender Justice is under consideration for publication.
Jana Rumminger currently lives in Singapore and works with Musawah, the global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. Her focus is on issues related to reform of Muslim family laws and implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). After graduating from Northeastern University School of Law, Jana spent a year as a Luce Scholar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where she worked on advocacy and law reform at a local NGO, Women’s Aid Organization. She then served as programme officer with International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific, an international NGO that works for the realization of women’s human rights through the lens of CEDAW and other international human rights instruments. She graduated from Princeton University in 1997 and earned an MS in Law, Policy and Society concurrently with her law degree at Northeastern.
Summary
Many contemporary Muslim family laws rest on patriarchal concepts. The time for change is now.
