As a native Arabic speaker and reader I do not encounter problems related to language. As an Arab educated in a western academic institution and living permanently in Norway I am, however, not vaccinated against the scholarly biases I carry when analyzing social and political structures in the Middle East. While some truth lies in Dogan and Pelassy’s statement that “[expatriation has always been perceived as a key to more objective
judgement”343, I am aware that the analytical glasses I put on to look at the region have been formulated in a western academic context. At the same time, I would add that my root- affiliation also makes me less scared of comparing among Arab states and across continents. For, as pointed out in part 5, despite evident differences in the constitution of political order in predominantly authoritarian and illiberal states in the Middle East compared to western liberal states, I find it challenging to highlight the fruitfulness of applying the same analytical concepts when analyzing political processes in both settings. Particularly relevant from a social anthropologist point of reference is that some anthropologists remind us that the similarities in the distribution and stratification of political power, socio-economic processes such as urbanization, and the development of states, are more evident among human societies than the differences between them.344
I rely mainly on secondary literature for my analysis on Morocco and Egypt in chapter 5 where I compare reform in family law in four states. For Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait and Jordan, I have been able to obtain primary data of different kinds. In Lebanon and Syria, I Ebert Stiftung and Konrad- Adenauer-Stiftung). In Lebanon, for instance, regional campaigns entitled “My nationality Campaign” advocate the case of gendered nationality law and is fronted by CRTD-A
(www.crtda.org.lb), kafa (www.kafa.org.lb) and nasawiyya (www.nasawiya.org). External financial support is not only western: in all six states, Islamic institutions registered in the Gulf are major financial supporters of welfare and educational related institutions and programmes, including women’s associations. Egypt represents a ‘special’ case, however, in that external financial sponsorship of local NGOs was made illegal by law since the mid-1990s. See Neil Hicks, "Transnational human rights networks and human rights in Egypt," in Human Rights in the Arab World, ed. Anthony Tirado and Hamzawy Chase, Amr (Philadelfia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 82-83; Nadje Al-Ali, Secularism, gender and the state in the Middle East: the Egyptian women's movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
343
Dogan and Pelassy, How to compare nations: strategies in comparative politics: 6.
344
Georges Balandier, Political anthropology (London: Allen Lane, 1970). See particularly chapter 4 “Social stratification and power” and “chapter 5 “Religion and power”. See also Roger M. Keesing, Cultural anthropology: a contemporary perspective (Fort Worth, Tex.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), 49-62.
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obtained copies of court appeals, pertaining both to persons who raise cases against the state (in Lebanon), and persons who raise cases in personal status matters in Syria and Lebanon. These cases were provided for by lawyers who anonymized the names of litigants.
In order to get an idea of how litigants present their cases in a religious court, I conducted two fieldworks at the Shi’a Court of First Instance (al-mahkama al-bida’yya) and the Shi’a High Court (al-mahkama al-‘ulya) in Beirut in December 2007 and in December 2008 (three weeks each year) where I interviewed judges and lawyers at both courts. Shi’a family law tribunals are open to the public in contrast to family law cases in Syria where both civil and religious courts are closed to the public. In December 2009 I attended six sessions where three religious judges and a civil judge who represents the Lebanese state listened to the cases of litigants as presented through their lawyers and where the religious judges gave rulings. During that period I read all 65 cases handled by the Shi’a High Court in Lebanon for the year 2007 to get an idea of the type of cases raised and the decisions made by a religious court.345
During my fieldworks I interviewed state officials, civil lawyers and judges, religious clerics who represent different confessional groups (in Lebanon and Syria), judges in religious courts, women’s groups, human rights groups, representatives in labor unions in Syria, representatives of pressure groups who lobbied for the citizenship decree in Lebanon prior to and after the citizenship decree was issued in 1994, as well as members of the Phalangist political party (al-kata’ib) and representatives of the Maronite League in Lebanon (ar-rabitat al-maruniyya) who opposed the decree.346 These interviews were unstructured and focused mainly on the subject of expertise which the persons interviewed represented. In Jordan I had the opportunity to partake in training sessions held by the Ministry of
345
After using approximately two weeks in order to obtain an official permission to get access and read the files on family law at the Shi’a High Court in Beirut, the clerk was puzzled: “Do you want to read last year’s protocol? All the others [visiting researchers] want to read the old protocols [dating from the 1930s]. They are more valuable. Are you sure you want to read the new ones?”. I mention this because it illustrates how little contemporary research is done on family law in Lebanon. Nisrine Mansour’s Ph.D. thesis entitled “Governing the personal: Family law and women’s subjectivity and agency in post-conflict Lebanon” (London School of Economic and Political Science, 2011) provides valuable insight into family law in contemporary Lebanese politics.
346
“Who are the Lebanese? Some political aspects of citizenship legislation in Lebanon” is the title of an unpublished paper on the Decree 5247 of 30 June 1994 (popularly referred to as the ‘Citizenship Decree of 1994’) in Lebanon which I presented at the conference “Redefinition of national identity and citizenship in the age of culturalist politics in Germany, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey” held at Bogazici University, 17-19 June 1999. The analysis of the 1994 nationality Decree is not included in the thesis, but serves as a historical event which highlights the politicization of membership policies in contemporary Lebanon.
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Planning where enumerators were being trained in order to carry out the 1994 census. In retrospect, such insights into how households and individuals are categorized and counted have proved fruitful in widening the scope of understanding how state apparatuses ‘think’ in politico-bureaucratic terms.347
My choice of interviewees in matters related to family law is to a certain extent biased. I have mainly focused on representatives and organizations, including religious associations, who convey conservative and liberal interpretations of religious text, and not those who represent ultra-conservative and fundamentalist interpretations of religious text. I have thus not approached individuals and associations that represent extra-official religious bodies nor civil societies with neo-conservative leanings such as Islamist revivalist groups and Salafist associations.348 While this choice may be seen as a weakness in my analysis on particularly counterpressures against reform in family law, I had to draw a limit with regards to meeting and interviewing persons and associations that voice arguments against
strengthening women’s civil rights within family law by referring to a particular religious faith. Such arguments are plentiful in the press and on the internet.349
In other words, I have approached and extracted knowledge from what I labeled as ‘concerned conservative catalyzers’ (CCC). This is the term I applied for my own personal usage when I interviewed individuals or groups who were concerned representatives within their confessional communities. They not only acknowledged gender injustices within family law regulations, for instance, but – more importantly – the social injustice and psychological as well as financial disarray of those affected, mainly children. Indeed, CCCs, though at times marginalized and ostracized, are present as members of their confessional groups and voice their demands for change.350 These representatives should not be viewed as demanding
347
James C. Scott, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); James C. Scott, "The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname."
348
It is important to note that I interviewed state officials and leaders of religious associations who represent and portray conservative as well as ultra-conservative views pertaining to gender differences in state agencies such as the Ministry of Religious Endowments (awqaf), the Faculty of Shari’a at the University of Damascus, the Shi’a High Court in Lebanon, the Maronite League in Lebanon, as well as the Greek Orthodox religious court in Damascus.
349
For references on Islamic websites, confer with Bettina Gräf and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Global mufti: the phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaraḍāwī (London: Hurst, 2009). Relevant articles in Norwegian, "Medier i Midtøsten: Regimets stemme eller folkets røst?," Babylon, no. 1 (2011).
350
This is the case, for instance within the Druze community in Syria as well as in Lebanon. Internal schism was particularly noticeable within the Shi’a clerical leadership in Lebanon where Lebanese religious scholar and judge Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935 - 2010) had public authority in issuing divorce, to the annoyance of
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radical changes. They are often deeply religious individuals who do not conceive themselves as revolutionaries. Many of the CCCs have – seen from a Norwegian perspective – fairly traditional and conservative views regarding gender differences; they perceive women ideally as mothers and homemakers, and males as breadwinners. What these
representatives demand is ‘change from within’, i.e. reforms that strengthen the position of women through new interpretations of religious text and by pointing at canonical law references and text that emphasize justice, fairness and righteousness, be it within Christian church laws of the different confessional denominations, Islamic shari’a laws and
jurisprudence, or Druze family laws.351