Of Wife and the Domestic Servant in the Arab World

Authors

Lama Abu-Odeh, Georgetown University Law CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

The author asserts to avoid common misunderstandings on the relevance of Sharia to modern women in the Arab World that a) Shari’s relevance to the lives of modern women in the Arab World has been largely confined to the area of family law, b) in the modern nation state Sharia has been codified, i.e., certain rules derived from Islamic jurisprudence on the family have been selected and passed as laws, each nation state having its own unique combination of such rules, c) the courts and the judges who adjudicate disputes on family law are either secular courts/judges, or judges trained in state-run judiciary institutions with specific instruction on the state-based modern understanding of what Sharia is and d) the code, rather than Quran, the prophetic traditions, or the school of Islamic jurisprudence, is the primary source of the law. The latter constitute secondary sources.

Scholarly Commons Citation

Abu-Odeh, Lama, "Of Wife and the Domestic Servant in the Arab World" (2012). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 1072.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1072