Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium

12. Shari'a in the Diaspora: Displacement, Exclusion, and the Anthropology of the Traveling Middle East

223 12. shari'a in the diasPora: disPlaceMent, exclusion, and the anthroPology of the traveling Middle east Susanne Dahlgren Any Western politician, judge or religious leader desiring instant fame or a dose of controversy has an easy option. All you need do is say “Shari'a” in public. —The Economist (16 October 2010) How is the Middle East “present” in today’s world? The question began to interest me as I followed the burgeoning anti-Muslim debates in Europe and North America sparked by the 9/11 terror attacks. The Middle East and its people, labeled “Muslims,” are increasingly visible on other continents, particularly in Shari'a controversies—debates over how much of “their religion” “we” can accept in“our”societies.What Shari'a, the divine law of Muslims, is, and how it has become the subject of some of today’s fiercest public debates, are the questions I address in this chapter. When looking at today’s debates, I compare them to similar controversies that took place during the colonial era when European countries extended their empires to the Middle East and North Africa, and in this endeavor, took Muslim law as a means of strengthening the legitimacy of the state. Similarly today, as I argue here, at issue is how the Western hegemonic state is attempting to control the bodies and minds of its subjects. For contemporary 224 Anthropology of Religion and Secularism in the mena anthropologists, today’s Shari'a debates represent a barely explored field that can broaden our understanding of how legal practice, in terms both of actual practice in and outside of courtrooms and of the discourse concerning that practice , can be studied ethnographically to show how subjects from different power positions participate in struggles for hegemony, control, and exclusion. Typical to our era, these debates often take place on the internet and satellite tv, where new meanings of Shari'a, devoid of a particular grounding place, are created and contested. In a 2007 German court case,a judge refused a divorce appeal by a Moroccan woman trying to escape a violent husband, on the basis that wife-beating is sanctioned in the Qur’an. In the court it became evident that the husband had regularly beaten his wife and had threatened to kill her. But because the husband and wife were both from Morocco, the judge saw fit to adjust the case according to her understanding of the litigants’ cultural background. Wife-beating is a standard practice in Morocco and the Qur’an sanctions it,the judge was reported to have commented (Medick and Reimann 2007). Newspapers around the globe reported how a Western liberal country had taken the Qur’an as the basis for a court decision. The case was condemned by German Muslim organizations as well as the press. The head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany criticized the judgment and proclaimed that wife-beating is not in accordance with the teachings of Islam (Landler 2007). Still, this was not the first time a European court had used cultural background to inform its verdict. Regarding family violence, there have been a number of cases in European courts where the perpetrator’s culture of origin was considered to be a mitigating circumstance.1 While the above is an extreme case of multiculturalism gone wrong, as scholars of Muslims in Europe and human rights activists alike would assert, it is also illustrative of the platforms upon which today’s globalized debates over Shari'a are taking place. At one pole, there are Muslim activists advocating the need for Shari'a, and at another, protectors of “Western values”for whom Shari'a merely stands for injustice.In between lie those migrant individuals whose marital problems remain in limbo in courts not sensitive to legal matters linked in one way or another to Islamic jurisprudence.2 In this chapter,3 I contrast two moments in history when European empires meet with Islamic law: first, when Anglo-Muhammadan law came to light during the British colonial era, and second, the era of today’s emerging “Euro-Sharia.” Shari'a in the Diaspora 225 I suggest that similar to the classical colonial period of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, when the blurred phenomenon understood as Shari'a emerged in Western scholarly discourse and legal practice,a similar phenomenon is unfolding today in Europe and North America. During the colonial era when European states...