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Gender, Islam and judgeship in Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2015

Nadia Sonneveld  and
Ahmed Tawfik
Nadia Sonneveld*
Affiliation:
Nadia Sonneveld is a researcher at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and scholar-in-residence at Al-Akhawayn University Ifrane, Morocco, for the academic year 2014–2015.
Ahmed Tawfik
Affiliation:
Ahmed Tawfik is a former Egyptian judge. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He also lectures at al-Azhar University (Cairo), and Sinai University (El Arish) in Egypt.
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

The issue of women serving as judges has been a contentious one in Egyptian society for nearly eight decades. While other Muslim majority countries started appointing women judges as early as the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until 2003 that the Egyptian government announced the appointment of its first ever female judge. Despite the approval of Egypt's religious scholars, her appointment was fiercely contested, among both the general public and the legal profession. In this paper we explore the question of why the appointment of women as judges provokes so much controversy in Egyptian society, and in the judiciary in particular. We show that the debate reveals a preoccupation with the proper place of women in society. With both traditionally educated religious scholars and people lacking formal religious training justifying their point of view by resorting to religious argumentation, the debate is also a clear example of the fragmentation of religious authority in Islam.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 341 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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