Introduction

§ ON 12 March 2000, some 300,ooo demonstrators took to the streets of Rabat, Morocco, expressing their support for a proposed new law that would expand women’s rights, including their right to divorce.

Opponents of the new law framed their position as a defence of religion and the family, claiming that the law conflicts with women’s duties to their husbands, and contravenes their 57zαπ'α-bascd status. Supporters heralded the new law as an advance for women, not (necessarily) a repudiation of shari'a. Those who had been working for years to bring such a law into being were seeking to alter women’s status as perennial subordinates in the context of the family. Indeed, the law’s significance, recognized by opponents and supporters alike, was its potential for eroding masculine privilege, albeit slightly, by enhancing women’s options to end a marriage. But the controversy marked by the huge demon­strations intimidated the government, and the law was withdrawn (Maghroui 2001: 16—17).

In Morocco, as elsewhere, one of the most common reasons women would seek to end a marriage is to extricate themselves from a harmful situation. Support and advocacy for women’s right to divorce are connected to women’s vulnerability to domestic violence.³ Indeed, the Moroccan law had been drafted in response to a recently published report with alarming statistics about the status of women, including 28,000 reported acts of domestic violence between 1984 and 1998 (ibid., p.

Domestic violence can be defined as ‘violence that occurs within the private sphere, generally between individuals who are related through intimacy, blood or law... [It is] nearly always a gender-specific crime, perpetrated by men against women’ (Coomaraswamy 1996). One of the strongest predictors of violence against women is the restriction on women’s ability to leave the family setting (Levinson 1989).⁴ But, as most women’s rights activists would concede, divorce does not constitute an adequate form of protection, or even an option for many women. Myriad factors discourage, impede or prevent women from leaving a violent relationship, including a lack of resources or support to establish alterna­tive domestic arrangements, and powerful social expectations and pressures to maintain family relations at any cost.

In this study, the central question concerns the relationship between domestic violence and shari'a. This relationship is of critical importance because shari'a provides both the legal framework for administering family relations and a religio- Cultural framework for social norms and values in Muslim societies. As the example of demonstrations over the Moroccan law illustrates, there are strong interconnec­tions between gender relations, religion and law. The example also illustrates the challenges to pursuing legal reforms to enhance women’s rights, and the ability — indeed, the likelihood — that constituencies with different interests and perspectives will mobilize and compete for state support.

This study seeks to provide an analytical framework and a comparative assess­ment of domestic violence in Muslim societies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The approach is socio-legal, probing the functions and uses of religious and other bodies of law, and tracing struggles over the rights of women in the context of domestic relations. Given the importance and attention devoted to the relationship between women’s rights and Islam, to date surprisingly little com­parative analysis has been generated about the relationship between domestic violence and shari'a. This study is an effort to redress this lacuna.