Due dates:
Reservations for group rate at the hotel: October 20, 2017
Pre-registration: October 24, 2017
The MESA 2017 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC will be held November 18-21 at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Deadlines for hotel reservations, pre-registration, and final program updates are quickly approaching.
- The Preliminary Program (pdf) has been posted. If you are a presenter, please check your name, affiliation and paper title (if relevant) and communicate changes to Mark. For the most current information, consult the searchable program.
- To receive the group rate at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel make your reservations by October 20, 2017.
- The conference pre-registration deadline is October 24, 2017. Register onsite after that. Registrants may obtain badges and programs beginning Saturday morning, November 18. If you have questions, contact Sara.
- MESA’s Cooperative Book Display is a place for publishers and/or individual authors to display books, journals, videos, software, etc. for the purpose of marketing their product and to promote future sales. Contact Rose for information, or see the CBD information
If you need assistance with membership, registration, or have questions about the annual meeting, please email or phone the MESA office (520-333-2577).
Islamic law-related Sessions
Judicial activism in the field of Egyptian shari‘a-derived family law
By Monika Lindbekk
This paper analyzes aspects of judicial activism in the field of Egyptian personal status law for Muslims. In a country where reform of the current personal status codes is politically fraught, family court judges perform an important semi-legislative task in interpreting and applying the law. Taking this as a point of departure, the paper argues that courts are an important site for exercising Islamic authority and positioning citizens as religious subjects. Among other things, family courts in Egypt contribute to an ongoing discourse on what constitutes the ideal family. In doing so, family court judges help consolidate increasingly hegemonic notions of the nuclear family and conjugal marriage clothed in the Quranic language of mercy and amity (rahma wa mawadda). Thus, contemporary family courts continuously re-inscribe shari‘a in state law and construct its meaning in a way which differs from classical Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This tendency has been reinforced by the introduction of computer technology with the stated aim of rationalizing legal practice by making it more uniform. The aforementioned developments in the family courts of Egypt resemble those that have occurred over the past few years in family courts of Tunisia and sharia courts of Malaysia where the same ‘rationalized Islam’ (in the sense of unified and standard) has been found to be at work. The introduction of computerization, which involves the same paragraphs being reproduced over and over through the medium of templates, provides a powerful impetus for the streamlining of judicial practice. However, in the years following the 2011 uprising, individual judges also used the courts as a platform to articulate alternative discourses. In the post-revolutionary environment, they clearly crossed the border between adjudication and legislation by participating in public debate and becoming members of a legislative committee tasked with comprehensive family law reform.This paper analyzes the implications of judicial activism against a background where old and new actors and institutions competed over the right to interpret shari‘a in an authoritative way.