Law, Culture, and Mobilization: Legal Pluralism and Women’s Access to Divorce in Egypt

Abstract Scholarship on personal status law systems in Muslim-majority countries stresses the challenges facing women’s rights activists seeking to reform family laws. Yet, little research is done on how Islamic family law systems, being inherently pluralistic, could enable activists to challenge hegemonic hermeneutical understandings of Islam. This article draws from a qualitative study of a decade and a half long campaign to reform divorce laws in Egypt to argue that dual legal systems, like the Egyptian one, enabled women’s rights activists to push forward novel hybrid rights claims, despite the structural and discursive constraints they faced. Grounding those claims in the context of Egypt’s pluralistic family law system and shrewdly negotiating multiple legal orders, including alternative interpretations of Islamic Shari’a and national codes, women’s rights activists successfully utilized the cultural power of legal pluralism. The success of this campaign demonstrates the ways in which the institutional and discursive dimensions of a pluralistic family law system in Egypt provided a surprising resource for reform. On a theoretical level, the case study presented in this article highlights the complex legacy and consequences of legal pluralism on women’s rights within culturally and politically constrained settings.