Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals ...

Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals
between legislation and interpretation of the law, because the shari’a provides
for ‘equivalent’ but not ‘identical’ rights for men and women. Under
the shari’a, women have, in practice, inferior rights, particularly as far as
civil-status and inheritance laws are concerned. Yet, nearly all MENA
countries have integrated these areas of Islamic law into their national
laws, while their commercial, contract, public, and social welfare laws go
back to European roots (Abou-Habib 2003, 67; Elsadda 2004).
This is why women continue, in many regards, to be explicitly discriminated
against by national law in the countries of the region. This goes in
particular for women’s rights when they marry, during the course of their
marriage, when they are divorced, in child-rearing and education, in cases
of inheritance, in passing on their nationality to their children (see Box 1).
This discrimination is especially pronounced in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and
the other Gulf states, and in Iran. Tunisia and Morocco in particular, but
also to a lesser extent Egypt and Algeria, have gone much further toward
liberalizing their civil-status law than the other countries of the region (see
Table A6, Annex, for a number of examples).
But women also suffer discrimination in other spheres of law. To cite a
few examples: For example, in some of the MENA countries, women are
not allowed to run an enterprise or borrow funds from banks without the
permission of their husband or father; and, in some cases, women are not
allowed to travel without male escorts. Iranian women are even not allowed
to sit next to men at work or in busses (Salehi-Isfahani 2004).
But just as serious if not more serious is the discrimination against women
in legal practice, which may deviate substantially from statutory law. One
reason for this is that beside national legislation and Islamic law (shari’a)
the customary law of individual tribes or population groups continues to
play an important role in the administration of justice. As examples here,
Würth (2004, 11) cites the practices of female genital mutilation still
common in some countries of the region and ‘honor killings,’ which, while
officially outlawed and condemned by most Islamic legal scholars, still
continue to be tolerated in many cases.
German Development Institute 63