Women’s Rights and Shari‘a Law in the MENA Region

With a focus on countries of North Africa and the Middle East (MENA) we intend to provide an overview of the different gender cultures existing in this area. Gender cultures in this region are all somehow affected by the relation between religious norms, political and legislative power, but the extent to which norms and regulations impact on women’s right can be different. Similarly, people also can combine
their quest for gender equality and the support for the religious influence on legislation and social life in different forms. Furthermore, gender cultures are subject to the country’s specific way of coping with the post-colonialist period and implementing reforms. Despite the strong normative effect of these institutional positions, there is not a unique way of living the link between religious faith and women’s rights. On the contrary, in the mena societies some feminist positions challenge the current status quo combining the quest for women’s rights with their support for the implementation of laws inspired by Islam in a variety of combinations, which range from secular to Islamist feminisms.
After providing a general overview of the gender cultures in mena countries, the contribution offers a reflection on the different outcomes for gender equality of the Arab Uprisings occurred in the region in 2011. In order to further explore the current gender cultures in the region, we observed how people combine the quest for gender equality with their support of Shariʿa law. To do so, we use data from the Arab Transformations Project, which investigated the social, political and economic transformation after the uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, and Tunisia. By using typologies built on the basis of extant literature (Badran, 2001; Fox et al., 2016; Mir-Hosseini, 2011), we identified differences in the distribution of Secular Feminist, Muslim Feminist, Reformist, and Islamist people living in these countries, illustrating a variety of gender cultures in line with the historical developments described by the theoretical literature.