If justice in the Arab world is often marked by a lack of autonomy of the judiciary toward the executive power, one of the characteristic features of the Egyptian judiciary lies in its strength and activism in the defense of democratic values. Judges have been struggling for years to enhance their independence from the executive power and exercise full supervision of the electoral process to achieve transparent elections. Recent years have seen growing tensions in Egypt between the judiciary and the executive authority. In order to gain concessions, judges went as far as to threaten to boycott the supervision of the presidential and legislative elections in the fall of 2005 and to organize sit-ins in the streets. The struggle between the two powers was in full swing in the spring of 2006, when a conference convened in Cairo in early April on the theme of the role of judges in the process of political reform in Egypt and the Arab world. The conference was organized by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) in cooperation with the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD). This book is a collection of papers from the conference dealing with Egypt. They allow a better understanding of the role judges are playing in the process of democratic reform in Egypt as well as the limits of their struggle.

Islamic Divorce in the 21st Century shows the wide range of Muslim experiences in marital disputes and in seeking Islamic divorces. For Muslims, having the ability to divorce in accordance with Islamic law is of paramount importance. However, Muslim experiences of divorce practice differ tremendously. The chapters in this volume discuss Islamic divorce from West Africa to Southeast Asia, and each story explores aspects of the everyday realities of disputing and divorcing Muslim couples face in the twenty-first century. The book’s cross-cultural and comparative look at Islamic divorce indicates that Muslim divorces are impacted by global religious discourses on Islamic authority, authenticity, and gender; by global patterns of and approaches to secularity; and by global economic inequalities and attendant patterns of urbanization and migration. Studying divorce as a mode of Islamic law in practice shows us that the Islamic legal tradition is flexible, malleable, and context-dependent.