Operational Muslim Family Laws (MFLs), inspired by the Qur’an, hadith, and fiqh, regulate familial relations (e.g., marriage, divorce, etc.) among Muslims. Fifty-three countries (thirty-five Muslim-majority,[1] eighteen Muslim-minority[2]) formally[3] integrate these laws into their domestic legal systems.
State-enforced MFLs undermine the rule of law and impose limitations on the fundamental rights and liberties of people subject to their jurisdiction. However, there is considerable spatio-temporal variation in the degree to which they limit individual rights and the rule of law. Governments’ responses to these limitations also vary widely. Until now, there has been no way of measuring this spatio-temporal variation across MFL systems. The Muslim Family Law Index (MFL-I) aims to fill this gap. It measures the extent to which MFLs are reformed or rendered compliant with the specific rule of law and human/women’s rights standards. The index, covering forty-three[4] countries from the 1920s through 2016, aims to enable researchers to conduct cross-national longitudinal analyses of MFL systems.
To address the adverse effects of MFLs on basic human/women’s rights and the rule of law, governments all over the world have undertaken a variety of interventions, which can be broken down into three broad categories:
1) Substantive interventions aimed at reforming material rules of MFL to improve women’s and children’s status and substantive rights (e.g., reforms raising the legal age of marriage, limiting talaq, abolishing polygyny, and equalizing the inheritance rules).
2) Procedural interventions aimed at increasing accessibility, accountability, and predictability of institutions and processes through which MFLs are implemented (e.g., redefining the rules for appointment of MFL judges, requiring publication of MFL court decisions, and subjecting them to judicial review).
3) Exit rights interventions recognize concurrent jurisdiction of religious and civil laws/courts. They allow individual Muslims to exit the jurisdiction of Muslim law and courts and opt for alternative civil (non-religious) rules for their domestic matters.
The type, extent, and success of interventions are critical to understanding extant differences across national MFL systems and exploring global and historical trends. In this respect, the MFL-I was built to measure the degree to which these interventions brought about progression or regression in fundamental rights and the rule of law over time and space.
The MFL-I was constructed utilizing longitudinal data on the three kinds of MFL interventions mentioned above, collected by a multilingual research team covering all forty-three countries. First, the team perused the relevant literature and conducted content analyses of CEDAW[5] country reports between 2000-2014 (official and shadow) from nearly thirty countries and identified the most common human rights/rule of law concerns and corrective interventions. All in all, the index includes eighteen reform measures across three categories (Substantive, Procedural, and Exit-Rights) (please see the Coding Manual for individual measures). The team then collected the relevant data by combing national legislation, secondary sources (pamphlets, newspaper articles, reports, scholarly papers, books, etc.), and consultations with experts. The team has perused and coded this literature.
Coding followed the scheme detailed in the Coding Manual. The process was repeated for all eighteen items on the scorecard, after which a cumulative Muslim Family Law Index (MFL-I) score was calculated and normalized using the formula below.
MFL-I: (Sum of individual scores to questions 1-18 on the scorecard)/ 36 x 100
The unit of analysis is the “country-year.” The MFL-I and its sub-indices (below) assign each country a score ranging from 0 to 100 (ideal types) for every year from its independence through 2016. The higher the score, the more reformed the national MFL system in question.
The MFL-I is an additive index generated by combining three types of interventions (substantive, procedural, and exit rights) into a single reform score. Therefore, aside from the cumulative MFL-I reform score, it is also possible to generate three sub-indices from the data to observe spatio-temporal variations in MFLs while accounting for categories of reform across time and space: The Substantive Reform Index (SR-I), The Procedural Reform Index (PR-I), and The Exit Rights Index (ER-I).
Theoretical assumptions and methodological choices informing the MFL-I and its sub-indices treat all three forms of intervention equally. In other words, in an “ideal-typical” MFL system, underage marriage, polygamy, and extrajudicial/unilateral divorce should be strictly regulated; individuals should be able to freely decide whether they want to be subject to religion-based laws or civil (non-denominational) codes; and challenge the constitutionality of MFL court rulings. Put another way, all three forms of intervention are critical to implementing MFLs in human/women’s rights and the rule of law compliant manner.
Muslim Family Law Index (1946-2016)
Due to space limitations, only decennial data is presented below. The full country/year dataset can be downloaded here. MFL-I values in the table are for the current year alone (not average values).
| 1946 | 1956 | 1966 | 1976 | 1986 | 1996 | 2006 | 2016 | |
| Afghanistan | 11 | 14 | 17 | 22 | 25 | 14 | 25 | 25 |
| Algeria | 22 | 28 | 39 | 39 | 39 | 39 | ||
| Bangladesh | 39 | 39 | 39 | 39 | 39 | |||
| Cameroon | 47 | 53 | 53 | 53 | 53 | 53 | ||
| Egypt | 22 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 31 | 39 |
| Eritrea | 42 | 42 | 42 | |||||
| Ethiopia | 25 | 25 | 47 | 47 | 47 | 47 | 47 | 47 |
| Ghana | 56 | 56 | 61 | 64 | 69 | 69 | ||
| Greece | 14 | 14 | 14 | 14 | 28 | 36 | 36 | 36 |
| India | 56 | 56 | 58 | 58 | 58 | 58 | 58 | |
| Indonesia | 22 | 22 | 25 | 33 | 33 | 42 | 44 | 33 |
| Iran | 22 | 25 | 25 | 33 | 6 | 25 | 25 | 25 |
| Iraq | 22 | 22 | 36 | 36 | 31 | 31 | 31 | 31 |
| Israel | 22 | 33 | 33 | 33 | 39 | 47 | 47 | |
| Jordan | 17 | 22 | 22 | 22 | 22 | 22 | 25 | 25 |
| Kenya | 28 | 28 | 39 | 28 | 33 | 33 | ||
| Kuwait | 19 | 22 | 25 | 25 | 25 | 25 | ||
| Lebanon | 25 | 25 | 25 | 25 | 25 | 25 | 25 | 25 |
| Libya | 19 | 17 | 19 | 28 | 31 | 31 | 31* | |
| Malaysia | 14 | 14 | 19 | 25 | 25 | 28 | ||
| Mali | 67 | 67 | 67 | 67 | 67 | 78 | ||
| Mauritania | 11 | 11 | 17 | 17 | 28 | 31 | ||
| Morocco | 11 | 33 | 33 | 33 | 33 | 39 | 42 | |
| Myanmar | 28 | 25 | 25 | 25 | 25 | 25 | 31 | |
| Niger | 44 | 44 | 44 | 44 | 44 | 44 | ||
| Nigeria | 47 | 47 | 47 | 47 | 42 | 42 | ||
| Oman | 11 | 11 | 11 | 22 | 22 | |||
| Pakistan | 28 | 36 | 39 | 39 | 39 | 39 | 39 | |
| Philippines | 50 | 53 | 53 | 53 | ||||
| Saudi Arabia | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 6 |
| Senegal | 17 | 75 | 75 | 75 | 75 | 75 | ||
| Sierra Leone | 39 | 39 | 39 | 39 | 39 | 39 | ||
| Singapore | 33 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 33 | 33 | ||
| Somalia | 22 | 39 | 39 | 6 | 8 | 33 | ||
| Sri Lanka | 19 | 19 | 19 | 19 | 19 | 19 | 19 | |
| Sudan | 22 | 22 | 25 | 22 | 25 | 25 | 25 | |
| Syria | 22 | 28 | 25 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 |
| Tanzania | 33 | 58 | 58 | 58 | 58 | 58 | ||
| Thailand | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 | 61 |
| Tunisia | 44 | 47 | 50 | 50 | 50 | 53 | 56 | |
| UAE | 11 | 14 | 11 | 22 | 22 | |||
| Uganda | 31 | 42 | 44 | 44 | 44 | 44 | ||
| Yemen | 3 | 8 | 25 | 28 | 28 | 28 |
*2011, the last year for which data is available for Libya
[1] Countries where the share of the Muslim population in 2011 was over 50% are categorized as “Muslim-majority” (PEW Research Center 2011): Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Gambia, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, UAE, Yemen
[2] Cameroon, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Greece, India, Israel, Kenya, Mauritius, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uganda.
[3] Formal integration means a) there is a constitutional provision, legislation, or an executive decree that establishes territorial, subject-matter, and personal jurisdiction of MFLs within the national legal system; b) MFLs are directly applied by state-appointed judges at state courts (religious or secular); c) rulings of these courts are often subject to the normative hierarchy of the national legal system that requires a review of their decisions by higher courts; d) MFL decisions are directly enforced by the government (even if the application of MFLs is regionally based). In this regard, MFL systems that are focus of this project differ from MFLs in countries where they are informally applied by non-state bodies (e.g., “shari‘a” councils in the U.K.), or MFLs in private international law disputes, which may be recognized by courts at host nations on an ad hoc basis without integrating them into national systems.
[4] Ten countries (Bahrain, Brunei, Comoros, Djibouti, Gambia, Maldives, Mauritius, Qatar, Suriname, Trinidad, and Tobago) with populations less than two million at the start of the project in 2014 are excluded.
[5] The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).