Feldman & Shariah

I was just as baffled as plenty of other people when Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested the acceptance by the UK government of Shariah for certain family law issues in UK Muslim communities. I associated Shariah with harsh and oppressive patriarchal norms and acts within Muslim society, and I could not understand why the Archbishop would publicly endorse such a legal system. In the March 16th edition of The New York Times Magazine Noah Feldman attempts to re-access the issue by providing a brief historical overview of the origins, transformations, and current calls for the reinstatement of Shariah in the Muslim world. His primary focus is on the role Shariah has played in balancing power within Muslim states and safeguarding individual legal rights (life, property, and legal process). In this telling, Shariah has been wielded by religious scholars as a means of keeping a certain class of political elites from gaining or asserting too much power and overrunning the legal rights of the everyday citizens. Thus, its revival today – in a more “legislative” form, shorn of its dependence upon scholars as spokesmen -- is largely articulated and advanced by groups hoping to place limits on autocratic regimes which they believe no longer respect the rule of law.

Individuals and groups hoping to transform society use ideologies, discourses, and images at hand; resistance and change do not operate in a vacuum, they are embedded within larger histories. Prof. Feldman does us a service by pointing out the ways in which Shariah has been used to support individual rights, including those of women. He makes it easier to grasp why Shariah would be considered – even by women – a means to achieve justice within Muslim societies.

Obviously, a writer can only cover so much ground in a Sunday magazine section of a newspaper. But questions remain. The essay serves as a corrective to limited thinking about the ways in which Shariah law addresses women, but it does not dispel some of the deeply troubling questions concerning women’s rights. Many of the questions I have concern local rather than theoretical issues. Shariah is being requested and fought for in certain Muslim states. How do those advocating other legal “frameworks” (which might extend even broader protection to women)– such as international human rights or secularized, “liberal” constitutional rights – fair in these states? And how do Islamist groups in those states respond to criticisms by these groups? Prof. Feldman writes that “In its essence, Shariah aspires to be a law that applies equally to every human, great or small, rule or ruled. No one is above it, and everyone at all times is bound by it.” But as feminists have gone to great lengths to show us, men and women are often “bound” by laws in radically different ways. Prof. Feldman asserts that “large numbers of women support…the ideal of Shariah in particular.” I would like to know more about the particulars of this support. For support of any regime or ideology within societies with such highly circumscribed gender orders begs the question of how consent, consensus, and support are arrived at. And then there is the local Western issue. Prof. Feldman starts the essay by referencing the Rowan Williams controversy, but he never responds directly to the criticisms the Archbishop’s statement brought forth. One of the most vexing being how to square Shariah with a “western” liberal democratic legal system which has come to grant (if not completely achieve in theory or practice) women an array of rights which are not found in the Shariah framework.