Why would an entrenched authoritarian regime establish an independent constitutional court empowered to perform judicial review? This is one of the most intriguing questions for students of contemporary Egyptian politics. In a country where the ruling regime exerts its influence on all facets of political and associational life, it granted one of the most important legal/ political institutions substantial autonomy from executive control. The paradox is all the more intriguing when one reviews the incredibly bold rulings that the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) has delivered on a variety

Once regarded as mere pawns of their regimes, courts in authoritarian states are now the subject of considerable attention within the field of comparative judicial politics. New research examines the ways in which law and courts are deployed as instruments of governance, how they structure state-society contention, and the circumstances in which courts are transformed into sites of active resistance. This new body of research constitutes an emergent field of inquiry, while simultaneously contributing to a number of related research agendas, including authoritarian durability and regime transition, human rights, transitional justice, law and development, and rule-of-law promotion. Moreover, this research offers important insights into the erosion of rights and liberties in "consolidated democracies."

Two decades ago, Martin Shapiro urged public law scholars to expand their horizons and begin studying "any public law other than constitutional law, any court other than the Supreme Court, any public lawmaker other then the judge, and any country other than the United States" (Shapiro 1989). Shapiro recognized that American public law scholarship stood at the margins of political science because it did not adequately engage the broad questions in the field. Perhaps more importantly, Shapiro recognized that judicial institutions had become important political players in a number of countries and that a "judicialization of politics" was on the advance across much of the world. Since Shapiro's first call for more comparative scholarship, there has been an explosion in the judicial politics literature focused on a variety of regions and themes, including the role of courts in democratizing countries, the relationship between law and social movements, and the judicialization of international politics. However, there has been relatively little research on the dynamics of judicial politics in non-democracies. 1 This gap in the literature is likely the result of a long-standing presumption among many political scientists that courts in authoritarian regimes serve as mere pawns of their rulers, and that they therefore lack any independent influence in political life. Note: This introduction includes material from The Struggle for Constitutional Power: Law, Politics, and Economic Development in Egypt by Tamir Moustafa (Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a more detailed elaboration of the theoretical framework undergirding this introduction, see Chapter 2, "The Politics of Domination: Law and Resistance in Authoriatarian States."

Al-Azhar, traditionally Egypt's most respected and influential center for Islamic study, adopted an increasingly bold platform opposing Egyptian government policy throughout the mid-1990s. Al-Azhar defied government policy on a variety of sensitive issues, including population control, the practice of clitoridectomy, and censorship rights. Moreover, al-Azhar directly challenged the government in high-profile forums such as the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in September of 1994. This open opposition was remarkable in light of the tremendous capacity that the Egyptian government has shown in the past to manipulate and control al-Azhar. Over the past century, and particularly since the 1952 Free Officers' coup, the Egyptian government virtually incorporated al-Azhar as an arm of the state through purges and control over Azhar finances, and by gaining the power to appoint al-Azhar's key leadership. Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Husni Mubarak all benefited from this dominance over al-Azhar by securing fatwas legitimating their policies. Given this overwhelming leverage, what can explain al-Azhar's increased opposition to the government throughout the mid-1990s?

In most Muslim-majority countries throughout the world, the laws governing marriage, divorce, and other aspects of Islamic family law have been codified in a manner that provides women with fewer rights than men (Na'im 2002;Mayer 2006). Yet despite this fact, the Islamic legal tradition is not inherently incompatible with contemporary notions of liberal rights, including equal rights for women (Wadud 1999;Na'im 2008;Souaiaia 2009). This divergence between Islamic law in theory and Islamic law in practice is the result of how Islamic family law was written into state law in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries throughout the Muslim world. A growing body of scholarship suggests that the process of legal codification was both selective and partial (Tucker 2008;Hallaq 2009a). Far from advancing the legal status of women, legal codification actually narrowed the range of rights that women could claim, at least in theory, in classical Islamic jurisprudence (Quraishi and Vogel 2008;Sonbol 2008).As a result, some of the most promising initiatives for expanding women's rights in the Muslim world today lie with the efforts of activists who explain that the Islamic legal tradition is not a uniform legal code, but a diverse body of jurisprudence that affords multiple guidelines for human relations, some of which are better suited to particular times and places than others. This approach represents a new mode of political engagement. While women's rights initiatives were almost invariably