Islamic Divorce in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Perspective

Published by Rutgers University Press 2022

Islamic Divorce in the Twenty-First Century

A Global Perspective

Edited by: Erin E. Stiles and Ayang Utriza Yakin
With contributions by: Erin E. Stiles , Ayang Utriza Yakin , Elisa Giunchi , Nathalie Bernard-Maugiron , Fatima Essop , Fulera Issaka-Toure , Jean-Michel Landry , Dorothea Schulz , Souleymane Diallo , Rune Steenberg , Katherine Lemons and Nadia Hussain

In the series Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts

https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978829091

Overview
Contents

About this book

Islamic Divorce in the 21st Century shows the wide range of Muslim experiences in marital disputes and in seeking Islamic divorces. For Muslims, having the ability to divorce in accordance with Islamic law is of paramount importance. However, Muslim experiences of divorce practice differ tremendously. The chapters in this volume discuss Islamic divorce from West Africa to Southeast Asia, and each story explores aspects of the everyday realities of disputing and divorcing Muslim couples face in the twenty-first century. The book’s cross-cultural and comparative look at Islamic divorce indicates that Muslim divorces are impacted by global religious discourses on Islamic authority, authenticity, and gender; by global patterns of and approaches to secularity; and by global economic inequalities and attendant patterns of urbanization and migration. Studying divorce as a mode of Islamic law in practice shows us that the Islamic legal tradition is flexible, malleable, and context-dependent.

Author information

ERIN E. STILES is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of An Islamic Court in Context: An Ethnographic Study of Judicial Reasoning and co-editor of Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast.

AYANG UTRIZA YAKIN is a research associate at the Chair of Law and Religion at the Religions, Spiritualities, Cultures, Societies (RSCS) Institute at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, and a postdoctoral researcher at Sciences Po Bordeaux in France. He is the co-editor of Rethinking Halal: Genealogy, Current Trends, and New Interpretation.

Reviews

"Islamic Divorce in the 21st Century is a wonderful book in which we travel geographically and intellectually. Its importance draws on the variety of national experiences it documents in a truly comparative perspective, as well as on the scholarship of both coeditors and contributors. It is a compulsory read for everybody interested in understanding how Islam is a global phenomenon with a huge array of local declensions."

— Baudouin Dupret, author of Positive Law from the Muslim World: Jurisprudence, History, Practices

"Islamic Divorce in the 21st Century provides rich empirical data and sophisticated theoretical perspectives on the gendered complexities of kinship and marriage, divorce, inequality, and Islamic law and normativity in nine nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. This engagingly written and compelling volume will be welcomed by scholars in various fields and has great potential for use in both undergraduate and graduate courses."

— Michael G. Peletz, author of Sharia Transformations: Cultural Politics and the Rebranding of an Islamic Judiciary

"Islamic Divorce in the 21st Century is a tour de force, offering both breadth and depth on Muslim divorce practices. In addition to presenting scholarship from rarely documented countries, this volume provides a perspective on global connections and the transformations that ensue. It is a must-read for scholars of Muslim family law."

— Arzoo Osanloo, author of The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran