Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law

Debates over family law are a sensitive subject in the Muslim world, revealing something of the struggle between forces of traditionalism and modernism. The highly disparate tendencies within Islamic "fundamentalism" share a desire to re-institute Shar'ia law, regarded as the last bastion of the Islamic ideal of social relations. This book probes the theory and practice of Islamic family law in the contemporary Muslim world, focusing on the dynamics of marriage and the consequences of its breakdown, and the ways in which litigants manipulate the law to resolve marital and child custody disputes.