Alright, let's take advantage of this hiatus in panic about Creeping Shariah™ to learn a little bit about American Muslims & the law, using the example of marriage & divorce. A #SmartInPublic https://twitter.com/DouglasMCharles/status/1404994697391714305

Muslims, who make up about 1% of the US population, are the country's most racially & ethnically diverse religious group. There's lots of variation in beliefs & practices within that group since, well, Muslims are people & people are complicated.

But one thing is widely shared:

Muslims consider Shariah, or divinely revealed law, a means of establishing justice & ensuring human flourishing for individuals & societies, as Prof. @intisarrabb explains. https://sapelosquare.com/2015/09/29/setting-the-record-straight-on-sharia-an-interview-with-dr-intisar-rabb/

The thing is, as in any legal system, people disagree about how Shariah's broad aims should be interpreted & by whom, how they should be translated into specific rules & by whom, & also when & how particular rules apply & if, how, & by whom they should be enforced.

In Muslim-majority societies of the past, this was an issue. In Muslim-majority nations today, it's an issue. In places where Muslims are minorities today, it's an issue. Pretty much everywhere, always, we've got multiple interpretations & multiple systems interacting.

One kind of conflict is between religious norms & civil law. This isn't unique to Muslims. The US has, purportedly, separation of church & state but its rules about which marriages can be recognized & how actually entangle religion & state more than in, say, Egypt.

Which brings us to Muslims living in the US, where civil laws that regulate marriage & divorce mostly align with but sometimes diverge from what Muslims understand to be key rules governing marriage, like who can marry whom, what property transfers happen at marriage, & so on.

Now, as noted earlier, Muslims differ w/ each other about how best to ensure that aims of justice & flourishing are met & what role if any civil authorities should play in that process. Most Muslim marriages are civil marriages, conducted by state-recognized officiants.

Those officiants are sometimes imams of mosques: again, the US lets *some* religious marriages count as civil marriages.

But other Muslim marriages are unregistered. Sometimes, that's because the spouses don't think it's the government's business how they organize family life.

On rare occasions, a marriage isn't registered because it's polygynous [>1 wife] & the state doesn't recognize marriages where one partner's already married. About that, you can be one of the 150K people who's watched this short talk from Dr. @DebraMajeed

Whether registered or not, there's often an informal or formal contract that lays out expectations, especially about "mahr" (also called sadaq), a marriage settlement that the bride gets from the groom either on marriage, at divorce, or part up front and part deferred.

In addition to the expectation of mahr, which can be megabucks or merely symbolic, some other things are fairly standard in Muslim marriage law, about divorce rights, property division, & other spousal obligations. Do Muslims always follow them? Nope. Is it a problem? Sometimes.

Here's the thing: if everyone stays shiny & happy it doesn't matter that your contract promises a massive deferred mahr on divorce but you live in a joint property state & you've always made more than your husband & a judge is going to have a tough time saying which applies.

But if Muslim spouses split, you've got the very American problem of two people & their lawyers trying to make the most advantageous case for their interests. This may involve appeals to Shariah. This isn't Creeping Shariah™ tryna take over. It's just lawyers lawyering.

It's hard to make firm claims about whether Islamic law or American civil law better protects Muslim women's interests in marriage & divorce. Too much depends on the particulars of any case. What is clear is that it's important to understand what kinds of issues might arise.

How to ensure that Shariah values of justice are translated into fair family laws to be implemented in contemporary contexts is something that Muslim scholars have been working on for a long time. Globally, @Musawah is doing terrific things. https://www.musawah.org/resources/ 

In the US, Muslim scholars, esp women, have been researching & analyzing these issues for decades. There are disagreements over tactics & priorities. Do we draft standard marriage contracts? Use prenuptial agreements? Organize Beit Din-like tribunals? Disestablish civil marriage?

There aren't straightforward answers to any of these questions. (As I said earlier: people, complicated. Plus: lawyers, very complicated.) But for those interested in exploring these debates, a newly-published reader gathers articles & essays published over the last twenty years.

Half of Faith, which is open-access & e-reader friendly, brings together old & new writings by me, Aminah Beverly Al-Deen, @ZahraAyubi, Juliane Hammer, @DebraMajeed, & @AQuraishiLandes on matters from wedding ceremonies to divorce settlements to case law. https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/42505?fbclid=IwAR1VT2LHZDhpuhOSnBgypsXDH7ki5bt0OQwyc7N5j1hEwGddY-T1ASzlaC4

Contributors grapple with patriarchal texts & interpretations, shifting norms in Muslim communities, & widespread ignorance & hostility outside of them. Some articles analyze how Muslim marriages fare in US courts (it's complicated), others explore interpersonal dynamics (same).

Looking at how American Muslim litigants navigate the US legal system as they marry & divorce makes clear is that civil law as written & as applied privileges some notions of marriage over others & therefore some groups over others. Law is necessary & useful but it isn't neutral.

Oh? Law isn't neutral, you say? I guess that means this meme was a good choice. https://twitter.com/DouglasMCharles/status/1404994697391714305?s=20

Also, exhibit eleventy-million for the point that religion + family + law = messy https://twitter.com/KeepingIt_101/status/1405536294562762756