Contesting Realities: The Public Sphere and Morality in Southern Yemen

3. Law and Court

87 3 Law and Court The Making of Familial Ideologies During the Colonial Era Like Melrose Abbey, Aden should be seen by moonlight. —Three Hours in Aden This chapter focuses on the practice of law as a specific field of gender regulation . As I suggested in the introduction, it is vital to understand structural factors and which of them provide the limitations and resources for people to constitute practice. We are dealing with a field where moral frameworks are acted out and where they get their meaning. In looking at the legal field and state regulation in it, I am particularly interested to see what kinds of gender ideas the court practices have produced and what the origins and bases of such ideologies are. The present chapter discusses the legal field in colonial Aden, and chapter 4 discusses the legal issues during the PDRY era and the period that emerged in unification. I start by looking at family legislation as a construction that has practical consequences to the community in the form of court rulings mediated by legal experts, Muslim scholars, and court judges. Family legislation is a form of state intervention in family matters, and it both informs and is informed by the prevailing sex/gender systems. I examine how the British colonial court system presented family relations and interpreted Islamic law and discuss the local responses to the British intervention in familial relations, a field that both the British and the local people considered the core of local culture. In chapter 4, I take a look at how the PDRY era provided another form of accommodating family relations and Islam to state rule. By focusing on how Islam was transformed after independence to serve new purposes and not just set aside, I want to avoid the dubious contrast of the secular and the Islamic. In such a false approach, the colonial rule and the Marxist government are presented as “secular” institutions with assumedly distinct religious domains in contrast to ritual practices and 88 | Contesting Realities the Muslim scholarly tradition. As Nikki Keddie suggests in her study on postcolonial Muslim societies, state control over religion would be a more accurate designation than an established secularism (1988, 11). In both the colonial and the PDRY eras, it was basically a question of weakening the social stratum most identified with Islam, the ulema (religious scholars). The legal field has perpetually been a site of contesting normative representations , and the question of religion has not been simple at any time. The postunification family legislation is in no way a “return” to the preindependence or precolonial state of affairs. Scholars of postcolonial legal systems have emphasized this point, too (Keddie 1988, 9). Therefore, this historical review gives a perspective not only on the changes in family legislation that took place after the unification, but also on the changes that were made after independence. As Sally Falk Moore has suggested, small-scale legal “events” bear the imprint of the complex, large-scale transformations. Legal disputes have an immediate internal logic, but they also have an external logic that is linked to conditions on a larger scale over long periods of time (1986, 11). In a colonial setting, local and outside influences are linked together and form new meanings. Legal discourse is a specific field of gender negotiations. It is where the public and private meet, if the former is understood as state intervention into family regulation and the latter as family affairs that the people involved want to settle on their own. Strictly speaking, the practice of law involves only families whose marital relations have come to the point that they look for an outside settlement. In a more general way, however, court rulings act as preventive or encouraging examples to all people, not only to those who consider their possibilities in court. As Carol Smart has suggested, the practice of law always contains power relations because the ideal of law implies a claim to “truth” and sets itself above other knowledge, such as common sense (1989, 10–11). In a court setting, where a couple’s private matters are discussed in a public forum, gender relations are negotiated in a manner different from the way they are negotiated in the family sphere because the legal discourse provides a framework to the discussions. It is a question of state intervention in the family, where the attitudes of court judges toward women also need to be taken into consideration, as I later show. The way...