Women of Jordan: Islam, Labor, and the Law

Amira El-Azhary Sonbol

Jan 2003 · Syracuse University Press

About this ebook

In the first book to address the dilemma faced by Jordanian women in the workforce, Amira El-Azhary Sonbol delineates the constraints chat exist in a number of legal practices, namely penal codes chat permit violence against Muslim women and personal status laws that require a husband's permission for a woman to work. Leniency in honor crimes and early marriage and motherhood for girls are other factors that extend the patriarchal power throughout a woman's life, and ultimately deny her full legal competency. Significantly, Sonbol notes that society's accepting as "Islamic" the legal constraints that control women's work constitutes a major barrier to any effort to change them, even though historically the Islamic sharia actually encourages women's work, and despite the fact that Muslim women have contributed materially to their society's economy. The author covers new ground as she effectively illustrates how Jordanian laws governing gender, family, and work combine with laws and legal philosophies derived from tribal, traditional, Islamic, and modern laws to form a strict patriarchal structure.

About the author

Amira EI-Azhary Sonbol is associate professor of Islamic history, law, and society at Georgetown University. She is the author of The New Mamluks: Egyptian Society and Modern Feudalism, and The Creation of a Medical Profession in Egypt, 1800-1922, and is editor of Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History, all published by Syracuse University Press.