Women’s rights have slowly progressed throughout the Western world over the last century, with more women than ever voting, going to college and choosing career paths to follow. Yet in Islam, women are still denied the right to initiate a divorce, a fact that has troubled and divided the religion for ages, a speaker said at Harvard University on Monday afternoon.
Havva Guney-Ruebenacker, an Islamic Legal Studies Program visiting fellow and S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, addressed a crowd of about 20 on the subject of divorce and marriage rights within the Islamic tradition.
“We have a huge inequality in the balance of power,” Guney-Ruebenacker said. “The wife does not have the same rights of termination as the husband does.”
In Islamic Law, which is a combination of Muslim jurors and Quran scripture, marriage is considered a mutual contract between a husband and wife, Guney-Ruebenacker said.
This marriage contract creates property of marriage that belongs to the husband alone, and the wife is considered part of this property.
Guney-Ruebenacker discussed the contradictions within this law, which she said gives support to the idea that the wife is in charge of her own sexuality and that the husband is not justified in revoking that part of her.
“The husband has no right to sell or lease his wife’s sexuality,” she said. “They entered a contract in equality, but when it comes to divorce, the exit of that contract, there is no longer equality.”
She used the analogy of a landlord and a tenant to explain male-female relationships. In an Islamic marriage, when it comes to the wife’s sexuality and body, she is the landlord.
The wife is considered to be “leasing” herself to her husband, making marriage a privilege and giving the wife the ownership of her own body, Guney-Reubenacker explained.
“Does the landlord have an inferior termination right to the tenant? Of course not. It is a privilege, not a right to ownership,” she said. “This brings about the question, “How can a wife be the owner of the property and the owned property itself?'”
Guney-Ruebenacker then discussed the self-enslavement of Muslim women through marriage. She explained that since women are a property owned by their husbands, a self-prisoner mentality is created.
In ancient Islamic Law, as well as in other cultures, marriage was defined as the “enslavement of the wife by the husband,” the speaker said. Therefore, divorce was an act of termination based on domination and divorce is the emancipation of that slavery.
“Today’s Muslim jurors are at a crossroad. They have to solve the inevitable problems of self-enslavement, marriage and divorce according to Islamic Law. They can’t arbitrarily pick and choose from these different theories about marriage, slavery and sexual slavery.”
Guney-Ruebenacker argued for women’s rights in marriage within the Islamic tradition.
Even with Islam’s history of sexual discrimination, some voices are starting to cry out for equality, she said.
Harvard Divinity School professor and event coordinator Baber Johansen, who is also the Islamic Legal Studies Program acting director, said the lecture “treated an important problem.”
“I think all college students should know the problems of certain types of marriage and family law,” Johansen said.
Sadaf Jaffer, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, said there was nothing she did not like about Guney-Ruebenacker’s lecture.
“For academic and personal reasons, I’m interested in the formation of Islamic Law and marriage contracts,” she said. “We have to remember that anything related to Islam is related to the historical context of that time. But when it comes to contemporary issues, it’s not the same in all areas of Islamic Law.”
Bashar Zeitoon, a Harvard alumnus who attended the lecture, said, he thought Guney-Ruebenacker “brought a new perspective to the ideas of personal laws in Islam.”
“Very few people talk about this and she argued from within,” he said.
Zeitoon also said the lecture was relevant given the current relevance of Islam in society.
“I think in this society, Islamic Law is in the news and in the media, especially after 9/11,” he said. “It is related to a political context. But in accordance with Muslim intellectual history, it is very interesting. This exposure opens a window to true Islamic Law.”
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