Egyptian Women Face Return to Days of Polygamy

Six years of relative freedom for Egyptian women comes to an end today with an official judgment restoring their husbands’ full Islamic legal rights over them.

Today sees the publication by the official gazette of the Constitutional Court’s decision of May 5 repealing the so-called Jihan Law, named after the wife of the late President Anwar Sadat, who was responsible for its decree.

The Jihan Law’s aim was to reduce the number of divorces, limit polygamy and give divorced women a minimum of resources, Mrs. Sadat said at the time. But it aroused the ire of Islamic fundamentalists who saw it as going against the Koranic Sharia code, and particularly the right of a man to have more than one wife.

The Jihan Law gave an automatic right of divorce to a woman whose husband took a second wife, but allowed her to remain in the home while the children were still legally in the care of their mother. This legal age was also raised from nine to 11 for boys, and for girls, 11 to 15.

For several months before the Constitutional Court considered it, the law was the target of the fundamentalists who often attacked it in the mosques as heretical. Some magistrates refused to apply it, citing their consciences.

The Constitutional Court annulled the legislation. The decision means that men can now once more take four wives without having to tell any of them of the existence of the others and can again divorce them at will. The wife also loses a portion of alimony payments that the Jihan Law had increased.