A Tale of Two Stories: Customary Marriage and Paternity. A Discourse Analysis of a Scandal in Egypt

338 Pages·2017·14.044 MB·English

by  Björn Bentlage

Björn Bentlage
A Tale of Two Stories
ISLAMKUNDLICHE UNTERSUCHUNGEN • BAND 333
begründet
von Klaus Schwarz
herausgegeben
von Gerd Winkelhane
ISLAMKUNDLICHE UNTERSUCHUNGEN • BAND 333
Björn Bentlage
A Tale of Two Stories
Customary Marriage and Paternity
A Discourse Analysis of a Scandal in Egypt
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Table of contents
Acknowledgements................................................................................................................8
Introduction...........................................................................................................................9
Initial interest and previous mentions of the case................................................10
Reorientation..................................................................................................................15
Law and sharia in contemporary Egypt..................................................................16
Contextualization..........................................................................................................22
Media and mediatization............................................................................................22
(Inter-)discourse theory...............................................................................................26
Synopsis and sources...................................................................................................30
Prologue................................................................................................................................34
Chapter One: Special Discourse–The Legal Story of Hind and Aḥmad
Draft Complaint............................................................................................................42
A –Theoretical perspectives on Egyptian law...............................................................46
I. The historical emergence of a special discursive formation...........................50
II. The apparatuses and special discourses of Egyptian law...............................60
B –The black letter part of the special discourse of law.............................................63
C –The reflective part of the special discourse of law................................................67
The relation of qānūn and fiqh in personal status law.....................................68
–A digression on shariatic references– ...............................................................69
The concept of marriage..........................................................................................72
The marital regime....................................................................................................74
The documentation of marriage............................................................................76
The concept of lineage..............................................................................................78
D –Legal questions..............................................................................................................81
The classification of sexual relations....................................................................81
The rules of evidence................................................................................................82
E –The verdict.......................................................................................................................83
Chapter Two: Interdiscourse–The Public Story of Aḥmad and Hind
A –Theory..............................................................................................................................95
A contradistinction of source types..........................................................................95
Jürgen Link’s model of interdiscourse.....................................................................99
Narrative patterns.......................................................................................................104
B –Drama.............................................................................................................................105
I. Act: Truth...................................................................................................................105
II. Act: The Discussions..............................................................................................123
III. Act: The Contestation..........................................................................................133
IV. Act: The Campaign...............................................................................................145
C –Scandal...........................................................................................................................161
I. Scandals and mediatization..................................................................................162
II. A mediated scandal in Egypt...............................................................................167
Phase 1. Latency......................................................................................................168
Cause..........................................................................................................................170
Phase 2. Ascent........................................................................................................178
–Sequential problems–...........................................................................................175
Phase 2. Ascent (continued)..................................................................................190
Phase 3. Consolidation...........................................................................................179
Climax........................................................................................................................181
Phase 4. Fall..............................................................................................................182
Phase 5. Rehabilitation...........................................................................................184
III. Comments on dramatic presentation and the analysis as a scandal.......187
IV. Mediated scandals and interdiscourse............................................................191
Chapter Three: Discourse Analysis–
Perspectives on Legal Change and Development
The case of Zayna and Aḥmad ʿIzz (Egypt, 2015)...............................................204
Discursive events.........................................................................................................210
A –Legal development and the special discourses
of modern law and fiqh............................................................................................212
I. Legislative changes.................................................................................................212
The law no. 1 of the year 2000..............................................................................213
The law proposals of 2006.....................................................................................218
II. Interpretational development.............................................................................221
1. Official fatwas......................................................................................................222
2. Judicial precedent................................................................................................233
3. Judicial discretion................................................................................................238
4. Expert debates and discussions.......................................................................240
B –Legal development and interdiscourse...................................................................254
The scandal as an interdiscursive event................................................................257
I. General mechanisms of interdiscursive depiction...........................................258
1. Accuracy and inaccuracy...................................................................................260
2. Inclusiveness.........................................................................................................265
3. Repetition and emphasis...................................................................................267
4. Inconsistencies and conflations.......................................................................272
II. Discourse positions and collective symbols.....................................................279
Debate structures in Egypt..................................................................................280
III. The interdiscursive event....................................................................................283
1. Standpoints and stances on lineage and genetic testing...........................284
The religious conservative standpoint................................................................285
The liberal progressive standpoint......................................................................289
Continued: the religious conservative standpoint...........................................294
The hegemonial standpoint..................................................................................297
2. Shifting discourse positions..............................................................................298
Conclusion..........................................................................................................................304
A –An interdiscursive model of of legal development..............................................305
Additional event types and the Arab Spring........................................................308
Additional event types and elementary discourse..............................................310
The dynamics of legal development.......................................................................312
B –The relevance of interdiscursive events for legal development........................314
The relevance of the scandal....................................................................................314
The general relevance of interdiscursive events..................................................316
C –Summary.......................................................................................................................318
Bibliography......................................................................................................................321
Laws and legal texts...................................................................................................321
Newspaper articles and other journalistic sources.............................................322
Other publications......................................................................................................327
Acknowledgments
This publication is an almost unchanged version of my doctoral thesis at the
Philosophical Faculty I at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in
2016. I would like to take the opportunity to express my thankfulness toward at
least some of the people who have helped to realize this project.
First and foremost, my sincere gratitude belongs to the dissertation advisors Ralf
Elger (Halle) and Stefan Reichmuth (Bochum), who have supported me and my
work in many ways. Some of the best ideas in this book have come from
discussions with them. I am also thankful to the participants of a joint colloqui-
um (Japanese Studies and Arabic and Islamic Studies), who have, over the years,
listened to instances of this work in several stages. Their critical comments have
no doubt improved it a lot. The same holds true for other colleagues and friends,
among them Astrid Meier, Thomas Eich, and Morgan Clarke. I am also deeply
indebted to Mirfat at-Talāwī, Azza Soliman, Nasser Amin, and several Egyptian
judges and lawyers whose insights have been so important, among other things,
in clearing up many misconceptions about Egyptian law and court procedure.
Parts of my research was generously supported by the Johann Wilhelm Fück
Foundation. And finally, I want to thank Ralf Elger for his great help in the pub-
lication of this book.
Transliteration follows the rules of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft.
Halle, July 2017,
Björn Bentlage
Introduction
At the heart of this thesis lies a scandal. It occurred in contemporary Egypt and
resulted in a string of lawsuits and a public debate that went on for two years.
The main events of the affair, which took place between May 2004 and May 2006,
can be learned from Arabic and English newspaper articles: a young Egyptian
woman named Hind al-Ḥinnāwī publicly claimed that she had agreed to an in-
formal wedding with the actor and host of a pious talk show, Aḥmad al-Fīšāwī.
Such ‘customary marriage’ (zawāǧ ʿurfī), i.e. private marital agreements without
official registration, lends some degree of religious legitimacy to sexual relations
that would otherwise be deemed unacceptable. Hind was pregnant at the time
that she stepped in front of the public and claimed that Aḥmad was the father of
her unborn child; Aḥmad denied his paternity, the marriage, and any relation al-
together. Hind had no documents to back up her claims and alleged that Aḥmad
had tricked her out of her physical copy of the marriage contract and then press-
ed her to have an abortion, she claimed.
Hind filed a lawsuit against Aḥmad that dragged on before the courts while
the wide attention that the accusations against a prominent figure had stirred fed
into an equally long public debate. The objective of the lawsuit was to establish
Aḥmad’s legal paternity of Hind’s daughter Līnā. The demand to find out about
Aḥmad’s biological paternity through genetic testing was discussed widely; the
court had asked for a DNA test at one point, but the examination ultimately did
not take place. Nevertheless, the demand had exerted so much pressure on
Aḥmad to prove his proclaimed innocence that he admitted a sexual relation with
Hind. He still denied the alleged occurrence of an ʿurfī marriage however, and re-
fused to undergo a DNA test.
In early 2006, a Family Court decided against Hind and in favor of Aḥmad.
The judges’ reasoning was that the legal paternity—or rather the paternal lineage
(nasab) of a child, to use the legal term—depends on the legitimacy of the relation
between the parents of the child, i.e. their marriage, which the court did not re-
cognize. The following months saw a politicized public debate about the ruling
and the legal situation regarding lineage, which falls into a realm of Egyptian law
that is linked to religious norms. Human Rights and Women’s Rights groups
weighed in, as did the country’s Mufti and many others. Then, in late May 2006,
the Cairo Appeals Court overturned the first degree ruling, recognized the pos-
sibility that there may have been a customary marriage between the contending
parties, and established the lineage of Hind al-Ḥinnāwī’s daughter Līnā to Aḥmad
al-Fīšāwī on the grounds of that possibility.1
1 The Arabic coverage will be discussed below, English articles include: Al-Ahram Weekly,
Dena Rashed, “Legally Yours” (2006/06/01); Cairo Magazine, Ursula Lindsay, “A public af-
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INTRODUCTION
Initial interest and previous mentions of the case
My initial interest in this case had to do with change and innovation. There was
something new and exciting about this affair. Although it was not entirely clear
what the new element was, I felt certain that the case involved some kind of mo-
mentous event that had made a difference between the time before the affair
began and the time after its conclusion. Hence, my initial goal was to identify and
explain the novelty of the case, to find, ideally, a new legislation, or perhaps some
subtler form of legal change, an innovative religious interpretation maybe, or, at
the very least, a marked shift in public perception.
Apparently, that perspective on the case of Aḥmad and Hind was shared by
others and a similar interest for novelty and change has informed most previous
mentions in academic literature. So far, I have come across five studies in English
and German that refer to the case;2 the publications of Ron Shaham and Hoda Sa-
lah discuss it over a length of several pages, the other three studies mention the
case only briefly. None of these publications deals with the case of Hind and
Aḥmad exclusively, they rather speak of it in the course of larger inquiries into
legislative and dogmatic developments (Welchman, Rohe, Shaham), and as part of
studies that take an anthropological or sociological approach (Sonneveld, Salah).
The topical focus of both approaches lies on the elements of ʿurfī marriage and
the role of DNA tests.
Lynn Welchman gives a short recount of the case in a study of Muslim family
laws across the Arab world; her study, published in 2007, traces the legislative de-
velopments of the last few decades from a comparative point of view.3 Writing
with an eye on human rights advocacy, she mentions the case of Hind and
Aḥmad in a section on paternity and adoption that “focuses on the obstacles that
remain in law to establishing the paternity of children born to a woman not in a
recognized or provable marital relationship with the biological father.”4 She places
it in the context of two topics, one being the adoption of biomedical methods in
fair” (2005/06/16); The Guardian, Simon Tisdall, “A new Egypt waits to be born” (2005/
03/01); The New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar, “Paternity Suit Against TV Star Scandalizes
Egyptians” (2005/01/26).
2 Welchman, Women and Muslim Family Laws in Arab states (2007), 142-149; Rohe, Das
islamische Recht. Geschichte und Gegenwart (2009), 211f.; Shaham, The Expert Witness in
Islamic Courts (2010), 175-181; Salah, “Moralwandel der Sexualität innerhalb der sunni-
tischen Welt und ihre Wirkung auf Familie, Bindung und Fürsorge,” in Familie, Bindungen
und Fürsorge. Familiärer Wandel in einer vielfältigen Moderne (2011), 646f.; Sonneveld, “Re-
thinking the Difference Between Formal and Informal Marriages in Egypt,” in Family Law
in Islam (2012), 83ff.
3 Welchman focuses on “third phase” legislation, i.e. new codifications as well as amend-
ments to existing “statutory expressions of the shariʿa governing family relations” after
1980, Welchman (2007), 15, 11.
4 Welchman (2007), 142-149, 142.
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