Page 126 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

5 Representing Family Law Debates

in Palestine: Gender and the

Politics of Presence

Annelies Moors

In the 1990s family law was once more hotly contested throughout the Muslim
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world. As a major means of regulating marriage, divorce, custody, and inheri-
tance, family law is central to the organization of gender relations and to the
reproduction of the social and cultural order in general. If this in itself makes
reforming family law already a highly sensitive issue, it is more so in that family
law, in many settings, is also the last stronghold of the religious establishment
and the only ¤eld of law explicitly framed through Islamic notions of morality. 2
Debates about Palestinian family law, starting in the mid-1990s, bring such sen-
sitivities to the fore. These debates have not only been a popular topic in the
local news media but have also been addressed in academic writing and docu-
mentary ¤lmmaking. A comparison of the work of a number of academic
authors (such as Hammami and Johnson 1999; Jad, Johnson, and Giacaman
2000; Welchman 2003; and Hammami et al. 2004) with that of a prominent
¤lmmaker (al-Zobaidi 1998) provides new insights into the ways in which par-
ticular media present and engage with public debates on family law. Whereas,
as I argue in this chapter, the authors and the ¤lmmaker analyze how gender
and Islam are implicated in these debates in very similar ways, there are striking
differences in the information that texts and ¤lm provide their audiences. Jux-
taposing the verbal accounts of academic writing and the visual information
presented in the documentary I point to these differences, but I also elaborate
on issues that have been little theorized in current work on the modern public
sphere, especially the importance of the styles of participating in the public and
the various ways in which power is at stake, be it in terms of agency and disci-
pline or as inclusion and exclusion.
In theoretical terms, if the neglect of gender has been a major ®aw in earlier
work on the modern public sphere, how religion is seen as impacting women—
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once recognized as a relevant category—also needs to be revisited. The early
Habermasian notion that secularization is a precondition for the development
of a modern public sphere continues to be prominent in debates about women
and Islam. More recently, however, the contribution of Islam to the emergence