Attitudes towards shari'a law
Despite the very public debate that emerged over reform of shari'a law from the mid-1990s, surprisingly few surveys have been undertaken on the issue. Prior to the Institute of Women’s Studies survey in spring 2000, commissioned by the research team for the purpose of this case study, the sole other such survey assessed only women’s attitudes and showed that 85 per cent of women wanted personal status law to be based on shari'a™ The same respondents who overwhelmingly supported shari'a simultaneously claimed that that the current laws did not ensure equality between men and women (66 per cent) and assessed the current legal systems as negative (79 per cent).
Bourdieu’s notions of ‘doxa’ (what goes without saying) and orthodoxy (what cannot be said) are useful in explaining this apparent contradiction (Bourdieu 1979: 168—9). Doxa stands for aspects of tradition and culture which are so internalized that they exist as unquestionable commonsense beliefs and dispositions. Clearly, for many shari'a is a doxa - in this case assumed to be an unquestionable good that even the everyday negative experiences of the law and courts cannot undermine. In contrast, orthodoxy is when authority tries to reimpose the ‘truth’ of a doxa that has been brought into question, either because the reality on which the doxa rests has changed or because subaltern or oppositional voices emerge to question it. To quote Bourdieu (ibid., p. 16g), orthodoxy ‘is defined as a system of euphemisms, of acceptable ways of thinking and speaking the natural and social world, which rejects heretical remarks as blasphemies’. Attitudes in support of shari'a can thus also be explained with recourse to the notion of orthodoxy. While for some social groups the centrality of shari'a in regulating gender relations is taken for granted and beyond question, for others shari'a has become a central concept within a larger political project that attempts to replace the present set of social and political arrangements. The goal of this orthodoxy is an attempt to reassert shari'a1?, central and ‘natural’ role in regulating all aspects of life. The suggestion here is that we need to differentiate between doxic attitudes in relation to shari'a as personal status law only; and newer orthodox attitudes which conceive of shari'a as carrying a much wider purpose and role beyond regulating gender relations. The doxa of shari'a in relation to personal status makes sense given that, as outlined in the previous section, it is the one general area of law in which shari'a has had a certain historical continuity to the present.In terms of attitudes, doxa, in particular, represents an obstacle to uncovering more nuanced, complex and varied stances towards shari'a as a basis of family law. Thus, one way of circumventing this ‘naturalized’ nature of support for shari'a is to pose questions which actually move closer to the level of concrete need and practice and do not directly invoke the concept itself. Based on this understanding, the research team in Palestine undertook a survey in May 2000 designed in ways that may reflect more of the contradictory attitudes towards Islamic family law in order to find openings for change. The survey was a means to probe more deeply into the contradictions between abstract loyalties and commitments and the concrete problems and needs of men and women as they confront the law.
More on the topic Attitudes towards shari'a law:
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- Women and Shari'a Law
- The Type of Islamic Law Implemented in UK Shari’a Councils and Muslim Arbitration Tribunal
- THREE Understanding the law: Egyptian family and social attitudes (results of the field study)
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