Assault on Egypt’s divorce laws grows

Press, 2 October 1979, Page 27

Assault on Egypt’s divorce laws grows

By

SHYAM BHATIA

Cairo Amendments to Egypt's divorce laws have been attacked as "unlslamic” by fundamental Islamic groups in the country. The Gamayat Islamiya, which draw's most of its support from university campuses, has launched a poster campaign against what it describes as the latest attack on Islam by the Sadat Government. It says that previous instances of anti-Islamic moves include the peace treaty with Israel and repeated attempts to distinguish between Mosque and State in Egypt. The new divorce legislation. which would allow women the coice of divorce if their husbands married more than once, has been supported by leading Islamic theologians. The Grand Mufti of Egypt, the Minister of Religious Endowments and the Sheikh of al Azharm, who heads Egypt’s centre of Islamic learning,

defended the new laws in a two-hour television broadcast to the nation. They said that Ejma, or consensus, is one of the underlying principles of Islamic law-making, and that the consensus in Egypt favours a change in the divorce laws.

Under existing family laws drawn up in 1929, women had the right of divorce in four strictly-de-fined circumstances. They included the discovery of physical or psychological defects in the "husband, a husband beating his wife physically, a husband damaging her in some social or moral way and, in the event of a husband’s imprisonment or desertion of his wife.

Marrying for a second time (Islam allows a man four wives) has not until now been considered a suitable reason for a wife to ask for a divorce.

Behind the proposed amendments, which the National Assembly was due to debate this month, lies a two-year campaign of intensive lobbying in

which scores of social workers and women's rights campaigners have been involved.

Foremost among. them has been a Cairo social worker and housewife, Aziza Husain, who is head of the Cairo Family Planning Association and chairman of the Londonbased International Planned Parenthood Association. She launched the national campaign to have the 1929 family laws amended.

She says the suggested amendments are important because they defend women’s rights and because they will help family planning efforts. Wives will feel more secure and better able to resist their husbands’ demands for larger families.

Besides additional divorce rights, the draft amendments also favour extended alimony and a wife’s automatic right to remain guardian of her children.

When Mrs Husain began her campaign, she was first ignored and later attacked by leading figures in the Islamic establishment, including the Sheikh of al Azharm. They were won round in the end by the sheer persistence of her efforts and by the support she elicited from President Sadat.

According to Mrs Husain, Sadat is a forwardlooking man who supports family planning and the fight for Women’s rights. But she says he was not prepared to make his support public until he was politically strong.

Now, in the aftermath of the peace treaty and after his party’s success in the recent general elections, Sadat has felt strong enough to take on the opposition. Earlier last month, for the first time, he endorsed changes in the divorce laws. — O.F.N.S. Copyright.