WOMEN RIGHTS IN LIBANESE EPUBLIC

20 CMI REPORT NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2017
IV. AMENDING THE SUNNI FAMILY CODE:
REFORMING PERSONAL STATUS LAWS FROM
WITHIN
A. The Sunni campaign to raise the custody age
Considering the great difficulty in introducing reform in the personal status codes of
religious confessions in Lebanon, especially for Muslims, the success of the civil campaign
to raise the custody age for children of Sunni parents, launched nearly a decade ago, can be
considered a watershed in the modern history of the country and a valuable case study for
introducing future reforms in the religious personal laws in Lebanon. This section traces
the course of this campaign, which began officially in 2006, spearheaded by the Family
Rights Network (Shabakat houkouk al mar’a). It carried out sustained lobbying activities
with politicians and religious authorities between 2006 and 2011, including organizing a
sit-in on 4 June 2011 in front of Dar al-Fatwa—the seat of the highest Sunni authority in
the country.
The idea for the campaign started unofficially in 2005 when the producers of a new
satellite channel catering to the Arab woman, called “hya” (or “she” in Arabic), began to
host lawyer Iqbal Doughan, a member of the Family Rights Network, on a weekly basis
to discuss Lebanese personal status laws and their detrimental effects on women’s lives. 31
Female viewers received the show positively, which gave members of the Family Rights
Network the idea of orchestrating a campaign to unify family laws in Lebanon by replacing
the multiple religious laws with a single, common one. The campaign initially sought to
bring together activists and experts from all confessions. For strategic reasons, members of
the network soon decided to focus exclusively on the sensitive issue of maternal custody. In
their view, this was an issue of de facto violence against women, since mothers facing the
possibility of losing their children at an early age following a divorce would feel compelled
to stay in an abusive marriage (Al-Masri 2011; interview of Doughan).
Moreover, the activists chose to start with an issue that is not dealt with in holy scripture,
to reduce possible opposition by religious leaders to their demands for change (neither the
Qur’an nor the Bible specify the age at which children of divorced parents have to leave their
mother to live with their father). Furthermore, the issue of custody had already been the
subject of successful reform in most Arab (and Muslim majority) countries in the region,
which precluded any “excuse” to reject reform on religious grounds. Finally, by opting to
push for reform from “within the confessions,” activists hoped to create a “domino effect”
(tasalsol), that would allow changes in the relatively easy issue of custody age to trickle
down and effect change on religiously thornier issues (like equal inheritance for Muslim
women, which is clearly proscribed in the Qur’an). 32
This was the start of the national campaign titled “13–15.” The campaign included
male and female lawyers, social workers, and activists from all confessions. For the Sunni
activists--the only group to have eventually succeeded in this nation-wide campaign, initial
work centered on collecting evidence of mostly progressive custody laws from other Arab
countries and using a Qur’anic jurisprudential approach to prepare a specialized draft law
for Lebanon. The next step entailed meeting with political and religious stakeholders to
seek their support, including a meeting that the then-head of the Muslim religious courts
Sheikh Abdellatif Deryan called for and held at his own residence. 33 As the leader of the
lobbying campaign for the Sunni confession, Doughan has explained,
Our objective in that meeting was to make sure that there were no religious texts regarding
[maternal] custody. All shari’a judges present then agreed that there was no scriptural text
31 Doughan became president of the network in 2008.
32 In Islam, women inherit half the amount inherited by the male siblings (Quran 4:11).
33 Deryan is currently Grand Mufti of the Lebanese Republic.