Section 9. Shari a, the state and domestic violence

The propagation of a collective trans-national and official position on the in­compatibility of women’s rights and Islam belies variations in the role and uses of shαri'α within Muslim societies, as well as differences between the three regions.

One regional distinction worth noting is that all the sub-Saharan African countries that have signed CEDAW have done so without entering reservations. However, such willingness has not, generally, translated into a more activist stance by African governments on matters of women’s rights. In Muslim societies in all three regions, family and social relations are patriarchal, and shah'a has tended to bolster these arrangements.

It may well be that restrictions imposed by Islamic and other forms of custom­ary laws are reinforced and magnified by state structures that institutionalize both Western and indigenous elements of patriarchy. All these elements come together to disadvantage women ø-ÿ-ñòã men. These disadvantages exist in all societies. The degree and type of disadvantage differs from culture to culture but the fact of disadvantage is universal and certainly not unique to Islamic societies. (Callaway and Creevey 1989: 8)

One way of engaging a comparative approach to the relationship between domestic violence and shari'a is to highlight variations in the relationship between religion and the state.

Communalization In countries where separate systems of personal status laws are applied to members of different communities, there are ‘two tiers’ of law, one under the direct control of the state, and the other based on religion (and/ or custom) and semi-autonomous from the state’s legal authority. In such contexts, laws and legal institutions governing family relations are not only legally separate from state law, but also are regarded ideologically as ‘outside’ the state’s domain.

Israel, India and Nigeria represent examples of countries where personal status laws are Communalized. In all three, the populations are religiously diverse, the national political systems are (ostensibly) ‘non-religious’, and each has a constitutionally-based legal system.³⁷ In Israel, Communalization provides every religious group (Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze) with its own personal status laws administered by religious authorities (Swirski 2000), whereas in India, com- Inunalization applies only to minorities, not the Hindu majority. In Nigeria, sectarian law is administered under the rubric of regional states rather than Communalization on a national scale.

In Israel and India, this two-tiered system was instituted at the time of in­dependence as part of a broader project of national integration to accommodate religious and social differences and encourage loyalty to, or dependency on, the state by religious authorities and constituencies; communal autonomy over dom­estic matters formed an element of the ‘social contract’ in these countries. In Nigeria, Communalization, and more specifically Islamization, is connected to recent political transformations, namely the end of military rule under regimes dominated by Muslims, which led to an Islamist retrenchment in the twelve northern regional states of the country where Muslims comprise a majority.

In Israel, the characterization of the state as Jewish' enables and reinforces discrimination against all non-Jews, men as well as women. Non-Jewish Israelis cannot claim the state as ‘theirs’, despite their status as citizens. This exclusion reinforces the significance of communal relations and institutions as sources of solidarity and protection (Haj-Yahya 1995, 1996; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1999). Be­cause the Israeli state sponsors and sanctions discrimination against its Arab citizens (Muslims, Christians and Druze), there is little appeal to regard the state as a legitimate source of relief or protection from domestic violence (Shalhoub- Kevorkian 1999: 202). In Israel, Arab women’s struggles for rights as women are in­extricable from their struggles for rights as Arabs living in a Jewish state (Ibrahim 1998). Consequently, in Israel Communalization is both a factor in women’s vulner­ability to domestic violence and a source of solidarity from a discriminatory state.

In India, Communalism - and especially communal autonomy for Muslims - has been the subject of intense debate since independence, challenged by those who advocate a uniform civil code that would apply to all Indians regardless of religion (Engineer 1996). Under this communal arrangement, the administration of shari'a is overseen by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. The debate about Communalism for Muslims heated up in 1985 following the notorious Shah Bano case. The Indian Supreme Court ruled that Shah Bano, a divorced Muslim woman, had the right to receive maintenance from her husband under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code of India. This provoked Conseiwative Muslim religious leaders and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board to protest state interference in a ‘communal’ matter.

In India (like other South Asian countries), estimated rates of domestic violence tend to be among the highest in the world. Experts and activists explain this by emphasizing the link between violence against women and low socio-economic status, which characterizes the situation for the vast majority. While poverty is not causal for violence against women, it can increase women’s vulnerability. For example, one form of domestic violence that is pervasive in South Asia, but particular to that region, is ‘bride burning’. This refers to the killing of women (often staged as a ‘kitchen accident’) for their failure or inability to provide additional dowry resources to the husband’s family. Although this phenomenon originated among Hindu communities, it has spread to Muslim communities in India as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh. In India, the parliament passed a law criminalizing bride burning and other forms of dowry-related harassment in 1983 (supplementing a 1961 law). However, the Communalization of shari'a has left Muslims beyond the reach of these state interventions, including criminal sanc­tions, for dowry-related violence and murder; the Dowry Prohibition Act (1986) exempts ‘persons to whom Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) applies’. This ex­emption, like the state’s response to the Shah Bano case, was instituted to placate leaders of the Muslim community and to deter sectarian Holence.

Communal politics in India exacerbates the vulnerability of the Muslim minor­ity on a national level, and this serves to entrench the power of a conservative religious leadership within the community. This communal vulnerability fosters a rigid refusal by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board to reform shari’a to improve and strengthen the rights of women (Engineer 1999), and excludes Muslim Indian women from the protections of national laws and institutions (Lateef 1998).

In Nigeria, Communalization has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years as a result of national political transition and Islamization in the northern states with large Muslim populations. The primary manifestation of this has been the enforcement of shari'a. In 1999, shari'a in the northern states was extended to the domain of criminal law, whereas previously it had been limited to family law.

On the national level, the Nigerian Constitution guarantees equal rights to all citizens, including clauses that bar discrimination on the basis of sex. Nigeria has ratified, without any reservations, CEDAW and other human rights instruments that guarantee women’s rights. However, the government has not instituted laws explicitly prohibiting domestic violence. The Northern Nigerian Penal Code reinforces the permissibility of domestic violence and the legal impunity of perpetrators: Section 55 of the Penal Code provides that

wife beating is permitted in so far as it does not amount to grievous injury... Nothing is an offense which does not amount to the infliction of grievous hurt upon any person and which is done by a husband for the purpose of correcting his wife, such husband or wife being subject to any native law or custom in which such correction is recognized as lawful, (cited in Effah et al. 1995)

Likewise, under this penal code marital rape is effectively permissible because it is not recognized as a crime.³⁸

In Nigeria, official tolerance of domestic violence is further reinforced by a lack of social services and assistance for victims. For example, in one study an official at the social welfare office described that institution’s mandate as ‘palliative and ameliorative rather than judgmental... [Ojfficials try to appease both parties’. He continued by reminding the interviewer that ‘the culture allows men to beat women. [Social Welfare Office officers] ask [women who report violence] if they are submissive to their husbands, or if they think their husbands are in a position to reprove them.

Official and popular tolerance for domestic violence in Nigeria appears to have been bolstered by the ‘Islamization’ taking place in Muslim-majority states in the country: The use of regional governmental power to enforce shari'a in states where it has been instituted makes it more difficult for women’s rights advocates to use national legislation as leverage; the very process of Islamization has been a rejoinder to a loss of power on a national level, and the enforcement of shari'a has been the primary manifestation to carve out a domain of control and autonomy for Muslims.

Nationalization Any state that defines the official religion as Islam and draws upon religious law and jurisprudence for its legislation and policies, but does not derive or base its own authority exclusively on shari'a would fall Mthin this category" in which religion is nationalized. This characterizes much of the Arab world and some countries in Africa and Asia with Muslim majorities.

Linking the power of the state to the application and enforcement of religious law blurs boundaries between religion and state power. This blurring has been pursued to consolidate a Muslim national community, and as a means for states to promote their own legitimacy among sectors of society which are inclined to see a commitment to Islam as a marker of ‘good government’ in the format of an ‘Islamic social contract’. It leaves open some space for debate over the relation­ship between shari'a and other bodies of law. On matters of women’s rights in general and domestic violence in particular, there is room for manoeuvre to seek state intervention and legal reform through reference to criminal and constitu­tional laws. However, there is also room for conservative constituencies to mobilize pressure on the state to enforce shari'a in a conservative manner. And when faced with critics pressing for liberal reforms, the state can resort to repression on the grounds that it has both the prerogative and the duty to ‘defend’ Islam as an integral part of the national character.

Egypt provides a good example of all of these aspects and dynamics. In principle, Egyptian law, including the Constitution, provides women with a right to equality. However, in 1981, under pressure from Islamists, the Egyptian Con­stitution was amended to position shari'a as the main source of legislation.’¹' The Supreme Constitutional Court has been given the task of determining whether new legislation conforms to shari'a principles. In practice, given the conservative ways in which shari'a is interpreted and applied to maintain male authority and female obedience, women’s rights continue to be lesser than those of men and their Vailnerability to violence is implicitly sanctioned by the state.

The issue of divorce is particularly illuminating of Egyptian women’s limited rights and their vulnerability to violence. Egyjitian courts follow a number of principles that function like legally binding precedents, which restrict women’s rights and limit available relief even in cases of violence. For example, according to Principle 22, ‘a husband’s inappropriate conduct is not considered [by itself] grounds for divorce’ (Tadross 1998: 18). Principle 59 states that ‘a wife’s return back to the home after having been harmed means that life could continue between them, which does not constitute grounds for divorce later’ (ibid.). Even if a woman is being beaten or hurt by her husband, she does not have a right to leave the home. Instead, her option is to seek relief from a judge. Moreover, even if she pursues such a course, in the interim she must not refuse to be obedient to her husband while she continues to cohabit the marital home. If the judge finds sufficient proof of harm, and if' he is unable to reconcile the couple, he can grant a divorce (ibid., p. 57).

Aside from the difficulties in meeting burdens of proof and the general reluc­tance on the part of judges to grant women a divorce, other factors impede women from leaving a violent home and pursuing a divorce. Often, women’s families would not support such a decision or take them in, and establishing separate homes for themselves is both socially unacceptable and economically unfeasible for the vast majority. Another significant deterrent is the likelihood that women who seek divorce will lose custody over their children.

InJanuary 2000, a new law pertaining to personal status issues was passed in Egypt, inspired by pressure from women’s and human rights advocates. But the text that passed was a significantly watered-down version of the original proposed law One of its provisions allows for ‘judicial khulⁿ, through which a woman could obtain a divorce without having to ‘prove’ anything if she refunds her dower to the husband and forfeits all financial rights and claims from the marriage. While this does, in principle, provide recourse for battered women who might not be able to obtain a divorce through litigious means, in practice the option is limited to women with the financial means to meet the repayment demands and renounce their financial claims.

The role of shαri'α in Egypt’s national legal regime perpetuates women’s subordination to male family members, and reinforces the ‘privacy’ of family relations, thus exacerbating women’s vulnerability to domestic violence. However, it is important to emphasize that shari'a is not a cause of violence; it is a con­tributing factor that hinges (and changes) on the politics of interpretation and enforcement. Moreover, attitudes about and practices of intra-family violence in Egypt vary by social location, as revealed by the Egypt Demographic and Health survey, which was conducted with a representative sample of Egypt’s population by the National Population Council in 1995. According to this study, most women who were ever married agree that husbands are justified in beating their wives at least sometimes. ‘Women are most likely to agree that men are justified in beating their wives if the wife refuses him sex or if the wife answers him back’ (el-Zanaty 1995: 206). This finding indicates that there is a high degree of tolerance for domestic violence in Egyptian culture, even among women. However, when it comes to the reasons people use to justify or tolerate wife beating, there was less agreement among the sample. Factors such as older age, years of marriage, marriage to a relative, the woman’s original free consent to marriage, living in urban areas, higher levels of education, and wage employment all reduced the probability that a woman would agree that a husband has the right to beat his wife under any circumstance. Among those factors, higher education and employ­ment were the most statistically significant. Nevertheless, even among those women who were most educated, around 65 per cent agreed that a husband Wasjustified in beating his wife at least sometimes. Similarly, around 69 per cent of women who brought income to their families justified wife beating at least sometimes (ibid., p. 206—7).

In terms of the practice of domestic violence, the survey reported that one out of every three ‘ever-married Egyptian women has been beaten at least once since marriage’ (ibid., p. 208). Of those women, 45 per cent were beaten at least once in the preceding year and 17 per cent were beaten three or more times in the same period. Like attitudes toward wife beating, frequency of beating also depended on the social, economic and regional locations of the woman. For example, the study found that wife beating was less frequent among women under the age of thirty, and much higher among women living in rural areas. Pregnancy does not seem to matter in deterring men from beating their wives. Overall, about one-third of the women who had ever been beaten had been beaten during 40

pregnancy.

The case of Egypt illustrates the ways in which shan'α-based rules may con­tribute to the vulnerability of women, not by mandating domestic violence, but by fostering conditions in which it can be perpetrated with relative impunity. Socio-political pressures on the state by conservative constituencies have created a legal environment that undermines women’s ability to seek state protection or intervention if this could be construed as violating popular perceptions of Islamic principles. There is a strong tendency to construe these principles as authorizing female obedience, and disobedience tends to be construed to license violence. Although the possibilities for law reform exist, as evidenced by the 2000 law, activists are constrained by an atmosphere where conservative interpretations of shari'a prevail. In contestations over women’s rights, the state tends to support and accommodate religious conservatives to bolster its own legitimacy and deter opposition by this powerful constituency.

Theocratization In countries where the state defines itself as ‘Islamic’ and bases its own authority on shari'a, religious law is the law of the state. In such contexts, defence of religion is conflated with defence of the state, and critiques or chal­lenges can be regarded and treated as heresy, which the state authorizes itself to punish. Iran and Pakistan represent examples of theocratization.

Iran defines itself as an Islamic Republic. Its official religion is Shi^,i Islam (of the twelver Ja'afari school). Its legislature is an Islamic Consultative Assembly. A Council of Guardians comprised of clerics is authorized to ensure that all national laws are based on or compatible with Islamic criteria. Iran’s supreme leader is an ayatollah (religious authority), and its top legal authorities must be mujtahids.

The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inspired, in part, by opposition to the Shah’s reform of family laws, and one of the new government’s first acts was the cancella­tion of the 1967 Family Protection Law, along with the institution of an array of new laws and policies that served to constrict women’s rights in accordance with a conservative interpretation of shari'a. However, over time, the Iranian govern­ment has found compelling reasons or needs to expand rights and protections for women, in part to support the claim that Islamic government is good for its citizens. To these ends, in 1992, a new set of Divorce Amendments restored many of the elements of the abrogated 1967 law.

In Iran, the process of building and legitimizing a modern statist approach to Islam has opened up debates over shari'a, including dissenting views of patriarchal interpretations from within the 'ulama. This debate has taken a highly public form in the national media. In a study of this debate in the pages of a women’s magazine, iζanan, Ziba Mir-Hosseini writes,

[A] ‘feminist’ re-reading of the shari'a is possible — even becomes inevitable — when Islam is no longer part of the oppositional discourse in national politics. This is so because once the custodians of the shαri'α are in power, they have to deal with the contradictory aims set by their own agenda and discourse, which are to uphold the family and restore women to their ‘true and high’ status in Islam, and at the same time to uphold men’s shari'a prerogatives. The resulting tension — which is an inherent element in the practice of shari'a itself, but is intensified by its identification with a modern state — opens room for novel interpretations of the shari'a rules on a scale that has no precedent in the history of Islamic law. (Mir-Hosseini 1996: 285—6)⁴¹

The articles and views published in Z^anan have raised questions about some of the most fundamental aspects of shari'a, including the legal basis for the assumption that men have authority over their families, or the obligation of unwilling women to submit to sex with their husbands. Within the context of a broader discussion about spousal relations, rights and duties, Z^anan has focused specifically on the issue of domestic violence. Issue no. 18 (1994) is titled ‘Sir, Have You Ever Beaten Your Wife?’, and issue no. ιg (1994) is titled, ‘Wife-Beating: Another Consequence of Men’s Headship’ (Mir-Hosseini 1996: 310-31). Number 18 includes interviews with men, women and children about their personal experi­ences with domestic violence, and commentary by a female lawyer discussing the legal rights of a woman who is subjected to violence. Number ιg discusses the jurisprudential dimensions of domestic violence, including a reading of Sura 4: 34 that draws upon fifteen traditions of the Prophet and utilizes a variety of interpretative strategies to argue against the religious legitimacy of wife beating.

Reformist trends in Iran have been mounting in recent years, as is evident in the election victories by reform-minded candidates (Kian 1998). However, these trends have been resisted and countered by a conservative clergy that exercises a great deal of national power. Although tensions between conservatives and re­formists dominate Iranian national politics, the popularity of reformists and their ability to command a majority in elections suggests a social openness to greater rights for women (Kian-Thiebaut 1999; Mir-Hosseini 2000).

To the extent that these rights claims are being articulated in terms of shari'a indicates the possibility that religious rationales can be deployed to prohibit violence against women. According to Homa Hoodfar:

[A] considerable sector of women’s activism in Iran employs not secular debates but female-centered interpretations of Islam and of the political con­cept of ‘Islamic justice.’ Through this strategy, women not only derail the claim that feminism and issues of legal equity are Western paradigms which aim to undermine the authenticity of Iranian society, but they also break the male monopoly on interpreting Islamic texts. (Hoodfar 1995: 3)

The kinds of liberalizing trends and female-centred interpretations of shari'a found in Iran are strikingly absent in Pakistan, where the trend has been towards more conservative interpretations of shari'a, to the detriment of women. Pakistani women are among the most vulnerable in the world to domestic violence, where estimated rates range from 70 per cent to upwards of 90 per cent.⁴²

Pakistan was created to provide a separate state for Muslims in South Asia to avoid minority status and subjection to a Hindu majority in India. The con­stitutional debates following independence were dominated by arguments over the place of shari'a in the country’s legal system. Although religious leaders demanded that the country be established as an Islamic state, they settled at the time for language that defined Pakistan as an ‘Islamic republic’.

The Islamization of Pakistan’s legal system began with Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the mid-1970s, but was greatly expanded following the military coup that brought General Zia ul-Huq to power in 1979. Zia appealed to Islamic values to legitimize his regime and granted religious parties, which did not enjoy much popular support, a power they had not previously had and a role in revamp­ing the legal system. The consequences were borne principally by women and minorities; in the first year of his rule, Zia reversed virtually all the reforms that had benefited women in the previous thirty years (Rouse 1998). He introduced the Hudood Ordinances, which changed the laws on rape and adultery and made fornication a crime, and the Law of Evidence, which renders the evidence of a woman equal to only half that of a man in some cases. He introduced shari'a benches in the High Courts, which became centralized as the Federal Shariat Court in 1980. This court was authorized to review all laws to ensure their conformity with shari'a.

These changes to the legal system have reinforced social attitudes about male superiority and domination over women.⁴³ In the 1990s, Pakistan’s democratically elected governments were unable or unwilling to repeal any of the Islamization laws that had been enacted under Zia’s martial law regime. In his second term (ⁱ997~99), Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif proposed an amendment to the Con­stitution that would replace the legal system with Islamic law. At the time of the coup that removed Sharif from power in October 1999, the bill remained stalled in parliament. According to Human Rights Watch,

Nawaz Sharif’s continuing Islamization efforts... reinforced the legitimacy of Zia ul-Huq’s discriminatory Islamic laws; they have in effect also bestowed greater discretion and authority on judges to give legal weight, by invoking Islamic precedents and references at random, to biased assumptions about women in a variety of civil and criminal cases. For example, since 1996 courts have admitted cases challenging an adult woman’s right to marry of her own free will, ostensibly an established right under family laws. (HRW 1999b: 23— 4)

Extremely conservative Islamists are a powerful constituency in Pakistan, in­cluding in the military that currently rules the country. If anything, their power and influence have been heightened by the US war in Afghanistan, launched in reprisal for the 11 September 2001 attacks, and by the raging conflict with India in Kashmir. President/General Parvaz Musharraf seems inclined to grant Islam­ists considerable influence within the country to offset anger over Pakistan’s cooperation with the US in its ‘war on terror’. Thus, national and international politics are important considerations in comprehending women’s vulnerability to domestic violence.

In Pakistan, violence against women is endemic in all social spheres (HRCP 1998: 130). Yet despite the high incidence of intra-family violence, it is widely perceived by the law-enforcement system and society at large as a private family matter. There is virtually no prosecution of crimes of assault and battery when perpetrated by male family members against women; even intra-family murder and attempted murder are rarely prosecuted.⁴⁴ Although Pakistan ratified CEDAW in 1996, it has done little to reform its laws and practices to comply with the Convention.

In 1997, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), an independent human rights organization, reported that ^ζ[d]omestic violence remained a per­vasive phenomenon. The supremacy of the male and subordination of the female assumed to be part of the culture and even to have sanction of religion made violence by one against the other in a variety of its forms an accepted and pervasive feature of domestic life’ (HRCP 1997: 185). According to a United Nations report on domestic violence, the family structure in Pakistan ‘is mirrored and confirmed in the structure of society, which condones the oppression of women and tolerates male violence as one of the instruments in the perpetuation of this power balance’.⁴⁵

The Islamization of the judiciary in Pakistan has exacerbated the problem. Judges have broad discretion to use Islamic precedents and references in a variety of civil and criminal cases (HRW 1999b: 23). Yasmine Hassan (1995: 57, 60) reports that in the absence of explicit criminalization of domestic violence, police and judges have tended to treat it as a non-justiciable, private or family matter or, at best, an issue for civil, rather than criminal, courts. If a domestic violence case does come before a criminal court, it falls under the Qisas and Diyat Ordin­ance of 1990, a body of Islamic criminal laws dealing with murder, attempted murder, and the crime of causing bodily ‘hurt’ (both intentional and uninten­tional). The law awards punishment either by qisas (retribution) or diyat (restitution) for the benefit of the victim or his or her legal heirs.⁴⁶ In qisas and diyat crimes, the victim or heir has the right to determine whether to exact retribution or restitution, or to pardon the accused. If the victim or heir chooses to waive qisas, or qisas is judicially held to be inapplicable, an offender is subject to tazir or discretionary punishment in the form of imprisonment.⁴⁷ In effect, the qisas and diyat laws have converted serious crimes, including murder and assault, into crimes against the individual rather than the state. In addition, women who have suffered domestic violence come under pressure by relatives to waive qisas altogether (HRW 1999b: 41-2; Shaheed 1994: 217). Qisas may not even apply in cases of wife murder if the woman has any children, because under Section 306(c) of the Penal Code, the child or heir of the victim would also be a direct descendant of the offender. In most cases of spousal murder, the offender enjoys total legal impunity.

Honour killings represent a particular manifestation of domestic violence in which women are killed because they are seen as the repositories of family honour (HRCP 1997: 187). Although such killings fall under the murder provisions of the qisas and diyat laws, the courts generally apply the English common law principle of ‘grave and sudden provocation’ and award little or no punishment. For example, a man was tried for killing his daughter and a young man when he found them in a ‘compromising state’. The judge sentenced the father to life imprisonment and a fine of Rs. 20,000 (US$500). When the case came before the Lahore High Court, the sentence was reduced to five years’ imprisonment and a fine of Rs. 10,000 ($250) on the grounds that the man’s actions were justified because his victims were engaging in immoral behaviour that could not be tolerated in an Islamic state such as Pakistan (ibid.). Another court used its discretionary authority⁷ under Section 338-F of the amended Penal Code which expressly permits the court to assess culpability on the basis of the Qur'an and hadith to decide that the right of self-defence could be invoked by male defendants in honour killings because ‘a man who kills another man for defiling the honour of his wife or daughter is protecting his property and acting in self-defence’ (HRW 1999b: 44— 5)∙

Domestic abuse in Pakistan takes many forms, including being burned, dis­figured with acid, beaten, threatened and even killed. In its annual report for 1997, HRCP reported: ‘The worst victims were women of the poor and middle classes. Their resourcelessness not only made them the primary target of the police and the criminals, it also rendered them more vulnerable to oppressive customs and mores inside homes and outside’ (HRCP 1997: 184). According to HRCP:

The extreme forms it took included driving a woman to suicide or engineering an ‘accident’ (frequently the bursting of a kitchen stove) to cause her death... usually... when the husband, often in collaboration with his side of the family, felt that the dower or other gifts he had expected from his in-laws in con­sequence of the marriage were not forthcoming, or/and he wanted to marry again, or he expected an inheritance from the death of his wife. (HRCP 1998: ¹85)

The pervasiveness of domestic violence in Pakistan provides powerful evidence of the failure on the part of the Pakistani state to defend women from violence. ‘Islamization’ of the country’s legal regime has increased their vulnerability, and to the extent that these changes are acceptable to powerful constituencies, it is difficult for recent governments to institute law reforms, even if they were so inclined, because of the inevitable protests that this would provoke by conservative Islamists. However, the particular ways in which shari'a is interpreted and enforced in Pakistan — ‘innovating’ to achieve the most conservative possible approach — is subject to criticism that the Qur'anic principles are being violated.

As the above examples demonstrate, the relationship between religion and the state is critical for understanding and comparison of the problem of domestic violence in Muslim societies. The examples also demonstrate variations in under­standing and implementation of h7zαπ'α-based^, rules in different states. While the use of shari'a to govern family relations contributes to certain commonalities, the variations across societies and over time are significant.