Egypt: New Divorce Law Implemented - Brief Article

I am sure the Feminazi's have there hands anywhere the world divorce is written.

March 6, 2000


"Change is about to shake Egypt's crowded courtrooms. Beginning on March 1, Egypt will put in place one of the Muslim world's most far-reaching reforms of family law. Among countries in the region, only Tunisia also makes divorce an equal opportunity alternative to an unhappy marriage. 'Before this, I really did not want my own daughter to get married because I saw again and again the trap that a woman can be in,' said Muhammad Amer, a Cairo lawyer who is considered an expert on Islamic family law and who lobbied for the changes.

With the new law, a woman will be able to divorce her husband, with or without his assent. And she will also be able to call on the Egyptian government to garnishee her husband's wages if he refuses to provide for her. If he disappears or cannot pay a court-ordered living allowance, she will be able to draw from a special state bank to keep her family afloat.

When they were proposed by President Hosni Mubarak late last year, the changes, drew fierce opposition. Conservative lawmakers said women were too flighty to be entrusted with the option of no-fault divorce. The proposals also were widely lampooned in the press as the work of man-hating feminists.

But an alliance of moderate Muslim clerics, women's advocates, civil court judges and divorce lawyers endorsed the reforms. To head off a backlash from Islamic hard-liners, they mounted a public relations effort to convince people that the law is a modern rendering of the equal rights that Islam bestows on women[ldots]Family law is generally based on Shariah, or the Islamic legal code, in Muslim countries, including Egypt. This has come to mean that a Muslim man can get a divorce automatically. But a woman must prove to a court that her husband beats her, is a drug addict, is sterile or does not support the family.

In practice, though, they are often stymied by judges who discount their complaints, according to reports by private organizations and because a husband can appeal the decree indefinitely.


In Egypt, where the civil and criminal codes are an amalgam of secular and Islamic law, there have been occasional attempts at reform. In 1979, President Anwar el-Sadat issued a decree allowing a woman to divorce her husband if she objected to him taking an additional wife. But the decree was later declared unconstitutional on procedural grounds.

Mr. Sadat's successor, Mr. Mubarak, did not try to restore that law, but did repeal an Ottomanera rule making it a crime for a woman to run away from an abusive husband[ldots]Little has changed in Egypt's divorce courts, where 1.2 million cases are filed a year, but only 71,000 are granted by overworked judges.

Fathi Shaheen, a gaunt man of 75, has made his living for 40 years at the Shobra courthouse helping illiterate women prepare divorce requests. He said he had seen more tears than he cared to remember. 'These men, they are greedy and they want to make the woman suffer,' he said recently, 'so they keep filing appeal after appeal'[ldots] Why can men keep appealing? Appeals are for murderers and criminals.

Even with Egypt's new law, a wife who wants a divorce over the objections of her husband will have to return to him any money or property that he paid her upon the marriage. That provision was the price paid for the support of leading Muslim authorities.