Dörthe Engelcke's Reforming Family Law begins with the seemingly straightforward empirical puzzle of why the stories of recent family law reform in two similar, semi-authoritarian monarchies in the Middle East and North Africa are so different. What follows, however, are two meticulously researched socio-legal histories of family law in Jordan and Morocco that do not provide easy answers. I say “however” because the wording of the puzzle mirrors—I assume, intentionally—how this question would be framed in comparative politics and other fields of political science. Indeed, the coupling of Jordan and Morocco as a coherent focus for study emerges from the authoritarianism scholarship within comparative politics. And because the comparative method is epistemologically tied to the search for universals, a predictable answer might have focused on structural differences that deviate from institutions and processes associated, for the most part, with Western democracies. Yet Engelcke proceeds to provide the rare kind of nuanced analysis that circumvents the pitfalls of the comparative method, such as flattening histories and arranging cultures and societies according to a unilineal evolution of progress. In focusing on comparisons between the colonial and postcolonial histories of family law reform in Jordan and Morocco, this socio-legal scholar's real puzzle, as I see it, is instead that of “why family law reform in the MENA region takes place at all” (p. 12).
Reforming Family Law articulates a much-needed critique of the functionalism that pervades both the authoritarianism studies and certain liberal feminist frameworks that would be puzzled by why Morocco's new family law of 2004 was seen as a societal revolution, when Jordan's changes to the family code in 2001 and 2010 barely registered as reform. Their answers might have settled for an explanation that Engelcke dangles in front of her readers but then proceeds to complicate: Morocco's King Muhammad VI claimed religious authority and personally led the reform of family law in 2004 by sidelining religious factions. Whereas in Jordan, King Abdullah II was largely absent from the process in 2001 and 2010, allowing religious factions to gain control over reform. Under such functionalism, kinship emerges as system-maintaining, the site where the boundary between the political and the religious domains is fixed. And family law reform is portrayed as an ideological conflict between women, Islamists, and other conservatives, so that secular feminist movements end up calling for greater state control over family matters and, by extension, over religious groups. But Engelcke shows how state interference in religious courts and family matters has a much longer history and how Islamists and secular women's groups are not homogenous and have sometimes even overlapped with respect to family law reform.
In eight illuminating chapters that alternate between Jordan and Morocco, Engelcke traces these processes of family law reform in relation to different historical legal trajectories. The second and third chapters show how family law reform was historically linked to questions of state power across two distinct legal systems. An especially strong second chapter examines how Ottoman, British, and French colonial policies shaped and codified both religious courts and family law. And Chapter 3 identifies these legacies in the contemporary judiciaries of each country.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 engage with how the reforms were carried out nationally and in relation to international law. Chapter 4 outlines the impact of the international legal field on family law reform by focusing on how Jordan and Morocco engaged with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). And the following two chapters chronologically study the processes of family law reform in Jordan and Morocco. Chapters 7 and 8 analyze how different actors in Jordan and Morocco contested issues of family law reform such as marriage of minors, guardianship, divorce, and polygyny. It is only because the book is so thorough that the absence of how family and citizenship laws intersect is conspicuous in these chapters, especially in relation to the Palestinian and Sahrawi communities in Jordan and Morocco respectively. Chapter 9 importantly turns to the implementation of the law by analyzing how street-level bureaucrats and women's groups interpreted and engaged with the 2004 law in Morocco.
Perhaps one of the most provocative claims in Reforming Family Law is that the book moves “beyond the gender focus” (p. 11). This is because Engelcke wants to, rightly, move beyond the question of women's empowerment. But postcolonial, transnational feminist scholarship has long shown that gender is much broader than how the category “woman” is conceived of in human rights discourses. Engelcke concludes that family law reform in both Jordan and Morocco “considerably increased judicial oversight and thereby state control over family matters” (p.233). Why does family law reform happen at all in the MENA region? The answer, of course rests in the historically contingent co-constitution of the state and the family; the law reveals how the state and the family are transformed together.
Ultimately, the central contribution of Reforming Family Law is to legally think together relations between the state and kinship—what Engelcke calls state-society relations—domains that have been traditionally and ideologically treated as distinct from each other. Feminist scholars, like Suad Joseph, have shown that this analytical domaining of the “politico-jural” as a discrete site of theorization has historically paralleled the ideologically gendered domaining of the “public” (the “political”) as distinct from the “domestic.” To analytically interrogate the historical, legal, and political conditions through which the boundary between the public and the private is contested by men as well as women, as Engelcke does, is to study gendered state-society relations. And it is to do so well!
Reforming Family Law will be a great resource to Middle East studies scholars. It is clear that the book is the result of meticulous research, if only for the gargantuan task of synthesizing and systematizing the family legal codes of each country. This was a particularly hard task for Jordan, where there has been less research on family law. Dörthe Engelcke made use of a wide array of legal, statistical, and journalistic written sources both locally and internationally. And one of the strengths of the book comes from the semi-structured interviews with judges, clerks, and members of religious and civil government units, women's groups, and Islamist organizations that animate and challenge state narratives about family law reform. The book will prove generative in both undergraduate and graduate seminars on the Middle East and North Africa. And it will hopefully inspire scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa that takes up the racialized formations of gender, sexuality, and kinship as integral, rather than supplemental, to the study of topics like sovereignty, border regimes, migration, bureaucracy, legal status, humanitarianism, development, neoliberalism, and capitalism.
