Women’s lives—our realities, needs, roles, and status within society—have changed over time. Our understandings of justice and injustice too have changed. It stands to reason that the family laws, practices, and policies that govern our lives in the 21st century must also evolve to reflect those changes in a trajectory of Islamic values of equality and justice. 

Yet, in many Muslim contexts, patriarchal and conservative understandings of Islam used by those in authority have preserved discriminatory legal frameworks that govern family life and remained resistant to demands for law reform. Many countries with Muslim populations have signed international human rights treaties like the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which obliges States to actively ensure equality in family laws—but some countries also use Islam to justify their non-compliance to allow discrimination against women because they say those are God’s law. This is simply not true. 

Over the past decades, scholarship and activism have made the case for the necessity and possibility of reform. There is a rich diversity of interpretations and juristic opinions within Muslim legal tradition that is echoed in the diversity of Muslim family laws around the world—no two countries are exactly the same. This diversity allows for legal flexibility that enables reform to take place, as it already has in many countries around the world to ensure equality and justice in the Muslim family. These arguments for reform, from Islamic teachings, international human rights standards, constitutional guarantees of equality, as well as evidence from our own lived realities, gives us a multitude of tools to push for reforming law, public policy and practice towards equality and justice in the Muslim family.