Women Judges in the Muslim World Women and Gender The Middle East and the Islamic World Editors Susanne Dahlgren Judith Tucker Founding Editor Margot Badran VOLUME 15 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/wg Women Judges in the Muslim World A Comparative Study of Discourse and Practice Edited by Nadia Sonneveld and Monika Lindbekk LEIDEN | BOSTON This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. More information about the initiative can be found at www .knowledgeunlatched.org. Cover image by Amr Okasha. The image depicts a veiled woman—Lady Justice—who carries the scales of justice on her shoulders. She is surrounded by a court of justice. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1570-7628 isbn 978-9004-30691-2 (hardback) isbn 978-9004-34220-0 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by the Authors. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents A Note on Transliteration vii Acknowledgements viii Foreword: Making the Case for Women Judges in the Muslim World Valentine M. Moghadam xi List of Contributors xix 1 Introduction: A Historical Overview of Gender and Judicial Authority in the Muslim World 1 Nadia Sonneveld and Monika Lindbekk Part 1 Comparative Understandings of Women’s Appointment as Judges 2 Do Female Judges Judge Differently? Empirical Realities of a Theoretical Debate 23 Ulrike Schultz 3 Women’s Access to Legal Education and Their Appointment to the Judiciary: The Dutch, Egyptian, and Indonesian Cases Compared 51 Nadia Sonneveld Part 2 Country Studies 4 Female Judges at Indonesian Religious Courtrooms: Opportunities and Challenges to Gender Equality 101 Euis Nurlaelawati and Arskal Salim 5 Seeking Portia and the Duke: Male and Female Judges Dispensing Justice in Paternity Cases in Morocco 123 Nadia Sonneveld vi contents 6 Female Judges in Malaysian Shariʿa Courts: A Problem of Gender or Legal Interpretation? 153 Najibah Mohd Zin 7 Tunisian Female Judges and ‘The Mobilization of the Emancipative Potential of the Tunisian Family Law’ 178 Maaike Voorhoeve 8 Lady Judges of Pakistan: Embodying the Changing Living Tradition of Islam 204 Rubya Mehdi 9 The Politics of Exclusion: Women Public Prosecutors and Criminal Court Judges in Syria (1975–2009) 237 Monique C. Cardinal 10 The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: State-Salaried, Female Legal Professionals and Foreign Policy in Post-Qadhafi Libya 259 Jessica Carlisle 11 Women Judges in Egypt: Discourse and Practice 284 Monika Lindbekk Index 317 A Note on Transliteration This book deals with many different languages, of which Arabic and the vari- ous languages of Pakistan use non-Roman scripts. We have given the authors the freedom to choose how to transliterate these non-Roman characters as long as it was done consistently throughout the chapter. In general, a simpli- fied system of transliteration is used in order to make the book accessible to non-specialists. Regarding Arabic, most chapters use just two diacritical marks: the single closing apostrophe’ to represent the hamza and a single opening apostrophe ‘to represent the ‘ayn. In one chapter, full transliteration of Arabic is used. In Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan, where Arabic is not the official lan- guage, many Arabic terms have nevertheless been integrated into local lan- guages in varying ways. The authors of the chapters studying these countries have opted for the region-specific spelling of localized Arabic terms. Acknowledgements On one particular day in October 2011, after the Egyptian revolution had changed many things, we longed for the one thing that had not changed: a delicious carrot cake served at the cafeteria of a well-known bookstore in the city center of Cairo. Enjoying our big chunks of cake, we talked about our research projects on the function of family law in the courthouses of Cairo, and how it had changed in the post-revolutionary period. We could not help but notice that one thing had proven to be resistant to change; the appoint- ment of women as judges in Egypt. A token number had been appointed in 2003 (1) and in 2007–2008 (42), but the numbers were so small that we had never met a single one of them despite our frequent visits to the family courts. “This,” an Egyptian judge and friend of ours had said, “is searching for a needle in a haystack. Forget it.” This was antithetical to the situation in Pakistan, where our colleague, Livia Holden, had told us that the mass appointment of women as judges in 2009 had caused the percentage of women in the judiciary to jump to more than one third. This development had inspired her and her husband, Marius Holden, to make a documentary titled Lady Judges of Pakistan. Released in 2013, it recounts the experiences of the women judges in dealing with litigants, law- yers, male colleagues, and male superiors. As many women were appointed to courthouses in remote areas, including (former) Taliban strongholds, Holden’s and Holden’s research project led them to very different parts of the country, both rural and urban—an enterprise which was not always void of personal safety risks. Inspired by Holden’s and Holden’s research in Pakistan, we wanted to delve further into the subject of gender and the judiciary in the Muslim world. Not only did we want to know how Egypt and Pakistan were doing in terms of appointing women to the judiciary as compared to other Muslim-majority countries, but also learn more about public opinion concerning women in positions of judicial authority. After all, while women hold positions of author- ity within the walls of the courthouse, this cannot always be said in situations outside the courthouse. At least on a legal level, women in the Muslim world are usually under the legal authority of a man, with the notable exceptions of Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey. In addition, we were interested in gaining more insight into the court practices of female judges compared to those of their male peers. There was, however, very little information available on the subject. In order to continue our search for scholarly knowledge, we decided to organize a workshop and invite the few legal scholars experienced in the subject of women judges in the Muslim world. Acknowledgements ix In December 2012, when the city of Oslo was covered in snow, we were very pleased to welcome a number of people to the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo: Ulrike Schultz, a world-renowned expert on gender and judging; Valentine Moghadam, who had published a report on the situation of women judges in the Middle East and North Africa, and who offered insightful and helpful comments that helped set the tone of the 2012 workshop; Monique Cardinal, who had done extensive fieldwork and research on women judges in Syria; and Maaike Voorhoeve who, very much to her own surprise, had noticed that her fieldwork research in the Family Court of Tunis had brought her in contact with women judges only, simply because all family law judges in this court were female. We were also very pleased that it was during our workshop that Livia and Marius Holden screened Lady Judges of Pakistan for the first time in Europe. We extend our thanks to these scholars who visited Oslo, some of them travelling long distances, to share their knowl- edge and experiences with us and to support the idea of a book publication. We also thank the scholars who were not at the workshop but who have contributed to this volume. Euis Nurlaelawati and Arskal Salim immediately agreed to contribute a chapter on Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, and one of the first to appoint women as judges. At the time, Malaysia had just appointed the first women judges to the shariʿa courts (2010), and we are very pleased that Najibah Mohd Zin has taken the time to describe this process in detail, both on the level of discourse and, through her interviews with some of the women judges, on the level of practice. Likewise, Rubya Mehdi’s fieldwork research in Pakistan and her interviews with the ‘lady judges’ provides detailed and vivid glimpses into what it means to be a woman and a judge in Pakistani society.