Pakistan

Khulʿ: Local Contours of a Global Phenomenon

“…As Sonneveld (this volume) argues, there is something puzzling about the fact that although Pakistan introduced non-consensual khulʿ three decades before Egypt did, this highly innovative Islamic law reform has not received much academic attention outside of the field of South Asian studies (see Akbar Warraich and Balchin 1998;Carroll 1996;Holden 2012;Lau 2007).2 This neglect may be because scholars interested in Muslim women's legal rights usually focus on one country or one region, with the result that developments in other parts of the world may go unnoticed. In socio-legal scholarship on Islamic law, and in the more narrow study of khulʿ and Muslim women's rights within family law, most research has focused on the Middle East and North Africa, from both 2 In the 1960s, Pakistan was the first country to grant Muslim women a unilateral form of khulʿ divorce in which the consent of the husband is not a prerequisite to make the divorce legally binding.…”