Khul' Divorce in Egypt: Public Debates, Judicial Practices, and Everyday Life by Nadia Sonneveld (review)

This monograph by Nadia Sonneveld is divided into two parts. It offers a media analysis of public debates and popular culture, including relevant films and cartoons, in relation to marriage and divorce from the 1970s to the 2000s in Egypt. It also includes a legal case study focused on a few women's daily experiences with marriage, lawyers, family court officials (judges and mediators), divorce, and remarriage in Egypt, especially with the passage in 2000 of Law No. 1, "The Law on Reorganization of Certain Terms and Procedures of Litigation in Personal Status Matters," and related legal changes that facilitated women's ability to receive a khul', or a unilateral divorce.

Sonneveld carefully analyzes the films Uridu hallan (I want a solution, 1975), Muhami khul' (The khul' lawyer, 2003), Uridu khul'an (I want a divorce, 2005), and Mudhakkirat murahiqa (Memoirs of a teenage girl, 2001). Uridu hallan's storyline, Sonneveld argues provocatively but in an oversimplified manner, led to the executive branch's 1979 unilateral change to marriage law and procedure in Egypt, which was overturned by the High Constitutional Court in the early 1980s and replaced with a weaker reform in 1985. The films produced in the 2000s, she more convincingly argues, are a relatively free (if misogynist) space that reflect tensions around marriage, divorce, and gender relations in an authoritarian context, although they are empirically wrong in representing such divorces as largely used by frivolous upper-class women against their henpecked de-masculinized men. More generally, the films, like other public sphere debates dominated by men and conservative voices, indicate a larger concern that these legal changes have shifted the "center of authority within marriage" from men to women (63). They also illustrate a number of other familiar themes, including a crisis in Egyptian manhood that can no longer rely on constructions of wifely obedience in return for male economic maintenance, women who resort to khul' as trivial and primarily motivated by fleeting desires and emotions, and Upper Egyptians as exemplary in their gender, cultural, and marital behavior and values, juxtaposed against urban and upper-class figures (especially women) as dissolute and Westernized in their desires, motivations, and practices.

There is much of value in this text. It is readable and empirically interesting at various points, including Sonneveld's comparison of Uridu hallan with Uridu khul'an, although the analysis is empirical and sociological (focused on characters and plot lines) rather than informed by discourse analysis or film theory. The book also includes an informative discussion of the "Group of Seven" activists and the decision of some of their members, such as Mona Zulficar, to make "strategic alliances" (not without tension) with the authoritarian state in the 1990s. Also important is Sonneveld's discussion of judges' practices and languages using scholarly and ethnographic evidence in the chapter on mahr (dowry). While Sonneveld addresses class, education, and regional distinctions between judges and court workers and their clients in this chapter, she rarely critically engages the obvious, that these are male-dominated institutions. Significantly, she discusses how judges in the Zananiri family court, in contrast to the intention of federal policy, have imposed fees on required mediation in order to stem the number of khul' lawsuits, erecting a significant cost barrier to the largely poor and working class women resorting to this form of divorce. The ethnographic chapter of her case study examination of Nura's negotiations, considerations, and decisions in relation to her remarriage reminds readers of how class and other factors fundamentally structure family forms, life, and options.

Despite these valuable contributions, the text would have been strengthened by a clear analytical framework. At various points the text reads as a "he said," "she said," "they allege" descriptive project. From an academic perspective, the author too frequently relies on a disconcerting rhetoric where she is the naïf researcher rather than...