Imagine three different women, each of whom is trying to obtain a divorce from her
husband. The first is a woman from a poor family living in an Anatolian province of the Ottoman
Empire in the sixteenth century. The second is an Algerian woman living in nineteenth-century
Algiers, then under French-colonial rule, who wants to divorce her husband on the grounds of his
impotence. The third is a Swahili woman in Kenya today, who claims that her husband is
abusive. How would these three womens experiences in the courtroom vary? In what ways
would they be similar? What do these differences tell us about transformations in Islamic law
over time and in relation to different social and political contexts? And what do their experiences
tell us about gender orders and womens negotiation with different legal actors and institutions?
Option 2: What is legal pluralism? How have polities differed in their management of
religious and legal difference? What is the relationship between Islamic law and legal pluralism?
And how has this relationship changed over time and space? In writing your answer to this
question, you should provide specific examples from the various historical and contemporary
contexts we have studied in this class. Consider the operation of legal pluralism in the Ottoman
Empire, in various semi-colonial and colonial contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
and in postcolonial contexts today that include both Muslim-majority and Western-liberal states,
such as Canada.
Option 3: In the last class of the term, we discussed the question, put by University of Toronto
legal scholar, Mohammad Fadel: Can Islamic law and secular politics co-exist? In some ways,
this is the latest iteration of a question that Muslims have been asking since the late-eighteenth
century. Another way to put this question is: How should Islamic law relate to modern life and
the modern state? In your response to this question, consider how different actors have
responded to this challenge, from pro-ijtihad reformers like Muhammad Abduh and Jamal ad-
Din al-Afghani, to Westernizing secularists like Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, to modern Salafists
like the Muslim Brotherhood, to Islamic feminists like Kecia Ali and Amina Wadud, and finally
to contemporary scholars like Fadel and Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na`im. Your answer should: lay
out their respective positions in relation to this question, map their relation to each other, and
finally offer some of your own reflections in light of your study of their various positions.
