§ WHAT were the constraints and opportunities for legal reform of shαri'α-based personal status law posed by the establishment of an interim Palestinian Authority (1g94-2000)?

At first glance, the establishment of the first democratically elected Palestinian government on Palestinian soil would seem to offer a critical ‘political opportunity structure’ (Randall 1998: 193) to develop laws that reflected the interests and requirements of Palestinian society.

An examination of the political dynamics of the interim period and the features of Palestinian rule are crucial to understanding why this law was not promulgated, despite many drafts and extensive efforts by the Legislative Council, until after the scheduled end of the interim period. They also provide a window into the complex links between state formation and legitimation, on the one hand, and the positioning of Islam, j∕zαπ ⅛-based law and legal reform, on the other. While Palestinian governance under the Israeli-Palestinian interim agreements (the Oslo Accords) had limited and non-sovereign powers and even more limited territorial control, it is precisely these circumstances that produce a rich field of inquiry where processes of state formation, the legitimation of the state and the constitution of citizenship can be investigated, as it were, in situ. The way in which Islam as ideology, religiosity and shari'a as a legal system are positioned and promoted in relation to these processes is crucial to an understanding of the prospects of legal reform, particularly reform of family law for gender equality. As Kandiyoti (1991: 185) has observed: ‘studies of women in Muslim society have not always acknowledged the extent to which aspects of state practice define and mediate the place of Islam itself’.

Such an examination of the Palestinian state-in-the-making is relevant to other state transitions, particularly given the fact that this emerging state is both authoritarian and weak, which is highly relevant in the Arab world context, and perhaps in other developing societies. Indeed, it may be the case that the limits on Palestinian sovereignty are ‘exemplary of the limits to sovereignty that the new world order is able to impose on certain national collectivities’ (Hammami and Johnson 1999: 317). The various actors shaping Palestinian political, social and economic development — among whom the Palestinian is routinely the weaker party, whether in relation to Israel or the international donor community — constitute a field of power where the emerging state is best conceptualized as a ‘set of arenas, a collection of practices’ (Curthoys 1993: 34).