Contemporary notions of justice, informed by the ideals of human rights, equal­ity and personal freedom, depart substantially from those that underpin rulings in classical fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and established understandings of the Shari,a.

This disjunction is a central problem that permeates debates and strug­gles for an egalitarian family law in Muslim contexts.

For instance, take the following two statements:

The fundamentals of the Shari‘a are rooted in wisdom and promotion of the welfare of human beings in this life and the Hereafter.

The wife is her husband’s prisoner, a prisoner being akin to a slave. The Prophet di­rected men to support their wives by feeding them with their own food and clothing them with their own clothes; he said the same about maintaining a slave.²

Both statements are by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292 -1350 CE), a 14^th-century ju­rist and one of the great reformers of his time.³ The first statement speaks to all contemporary Muslims, and both advocates of gender equality and their oppo­nents often use it as an epigraph.⁴ But the second statement, which reflects clas­sical fiqh conceptions of marriage, goes against the very grain of what many con­temporary Muslims consider to be ‘Justice, Kindness, the Common Good and Wisdom’. Consequently, Muslim legal tradition and its textual sources have come to appear hypocritical or at best contradictory. This faces those who strug­gle to reform Muslim family laws with a quandary and a host of questions: What is the notion of justice in Islam’s sacred texts? Does it include the notion of equality for women before the law? If so, how are we to understand those ele­ments of the primary sources of the Shari‘a (Qur’an and hadith) that appear not to treat men and women as equals? Can gender equality and Shari‘a- based laws go together?

These questions are central to the ongoing struggle for an egalitarian con­struction of family laws in Muslim contexts, and have been vigorously debated among Muslims since the late nineteenth century.^[117] Some consider religion to be inherently patriarchal and that any engagement with it to be a futile and in­correct strategy;^[118] others argue that, given the linkage between the religious and political dimensions of identity in Muslim contexts, the path to legal equality for women in those contexts necessarily passes through religion.^[119] This chapter aims to explore these questions and address what often remains neglected in this de­bate: how Muslim women’s struggle for equality is embedded in the intimate links between theology and politics. My central argument has two elements.

After a brief examination of the notion of gender justice in classical fiqh texts, I sketch twentieth-century developments in the politics of religion, law and gender in Muslim contexts. This is followed by a discussion of two reform texts that negotiate and bridge the chasm, the dissonance, between contempo­rary notions of justice and gender rights and those informed by classical fiqh rul­ings and lay the groundwork for an egalitarian family law. These are the book Women in the Shari^,a and in Our Society (1930) by the Tunisian religious reform thinker Tahir Haddad, and the article ‘The Status of Women in Islam: A Modern­ist Interpretation’ (1982) by the Pakistani reform thinker Fazlur Rahman. I have chosen to focus on these two texts because they belong to two key moments in the Muslim debate and struggle for defining the scope of women’s rights in the twentieth-century. Haddad’s book appeared in the context of early twentieth­century debates and the early phase of the codification of Muslim family law; Fa- zlur Rahman’s article was published when political Islam was at its zenith and Islamists, trumpeting the slogan of ‘return to Shari‘a’ were dismantling some ear­lier reforms. Both thinkers met with a great deal of opposition from the clerical establishments in their own countries at the time, but their ideas, which conser­vative clerics declared to be heretical, proved to be instrumental in shaping later discourses and developments. Tahir Haddad’s ideas informed Tunisian family law, which was codified in 1956 and to this day remains the only Muslim code that bans polygamy. Fazlur Rahman developed a methodology and framework that by the end of the century facilitated the emergence of feminist scholarship in Islam. I conclude by considering the implication of this scholarship for chang­ing the terms of reference of the debates over Muslim family law reforms.