Family Attorney

The narrow corridors of Family Court were once painted a cheerful red, but now they are pitted and stained with a dull brown patina of grime and the smoke from countless acrid cigarettes.

The stories told in these trash-strewn hallways are just as dismal: children abandoned, families impoverished and women trapped in marriages they can escape only with permission from their husbands.

‘’I can’t find my husband,'’ said Saida Muhammad Osman, a careworn 50-year-old woman perched on the surviving half of a broken plastic chair in the crowded hallway of the courthouse in central Cairo. ‘’Every few years he comes back for a few days, but usually I am on my own with my children.'’

Mrs. Osman’s hopes have been as meager as her circumstances. She dreams of getting a divorce, required to enable her to collect her dead father’s pension – hardly a princely sum at the equivalent of just over $6 a month. Knowing her husband can delay a final judgment for years, she feared that any relief would come too late to do her family much good.

But change is about to shake Egypt’s crowded and melancholy courtrooms. Beginning on Wednesday, Egypt will put in place one of the Muslim world’s most far-reaching reforms of family law. Among countries in the region, only Tunisia also makes divorce an equal opportunity alternative to an unhappy marriage.

‘’Before this, I really did not want my own daughter to get married because I saw again and again the trap that a woman can be in in this country,'’ said Muhammad Amer, a Cairo lawyer who is considered an expert on Islamic family law and who lobbied for the changes. ‘’Now I’m not worried, because she can get rid of the man when she wants.'’

With the new law, a woman will be able to divorce her husband, with or without his assent. And she will also be able to call on the Egyptian government to garnishee her husband’s wages if he refuses to provide for her. If he disappears or cannot pay a court-ordered living allowance, she will be able to draw from a special state bank to keep her family afloat.

When they were proposed by President Hosni Mubarak late last year, the changes drew fierce opposition. Conservative lawmakers said women were too flighty to be entrusted with the option of no-fault divorce. The proposals also were widely lampooned in the press as the work of man-hating feminists.

But an alliance of moderate Muslim clerics, women’s advocates, civil court judges and divorce lawyers endorsed the reforms. To head off a backlash from Islamic hard-liners, they mounted a public relations effort to convince people that the law is a modern rendering of the equal rights that Islam bestows on women.

‘’Maybe Egyptian society is not in the best condition now to discuss this law,'’ said Fathi Naguib, an assistant justice minister who drafted the law. ‘’But every society needs a shock, one that doesn’t go so far that it can’t be absorbed but one that is still a little step forward. This was a necessary and overdue shock.'’

Family law is generally based on Shariah, or the Islamic legal code, in Muslim countries, including Egypt. This has come to mean that a Muslim man can get a divorce automatically. But a woman must prove to a court that her husband beats her, is a drug addict, is sterile or does not support the family.

In practice, though, they are often stymied by judges who discount their complaints, according to reports by private organizations and the State Department. Even when she is granted a divorce, a woman may not be free because her husband can appeal the decree indefinitely.

In Egypt, where the civil and criminal codes are an amalgam of secular and Islamic law, there have been occasional attempts at reform. In 1979, President Anwar el-Sadat issued a decree allowing a woman to divorce her husband if she objected to him taking an additional wife. But the decree was later declared unconstitutional on procedural grounds.

Mr. Sadat’s successor, Mr. Mubarak, did not try to restore that law, but did repeal an Ottoman-era rule making it a crime for a woman to run away from an abusive husband.

Source : query.nytimes.com