Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari is a former revolutionary and clerical reformer who became one of the Islamic Republic's most outspoken critics. His ideas of ""Islamic democratic government"" have attracted considerable attention in Iran and elsewhere. In presenting a selection of Eshkevari's writings, this book reveals a trajectory of dissent common to all Islamic nations today and makes a highly original contribution to our understanding of the difficult social and political issues confronting the Muslim world.

Islamic family law has an immediate and direct impact on the lives of Muslim men, women and children, whose personal status continues to be defined by understandings of Islamic law codified and adapted by modern nation-states. This book examines how male authority is sustained through law and court practice, the consequences for women and the family, and the demands made by Muslim women's groups. Examining the construction of male guardianship (qiwama, wilaya) in the Islamic tradition, it also seeks to create an argument for women's full equality before the law. Bringing together renowned...

Debates over family law are a sensitive subject in the Muslim world, revealing something of the struggle between forces of traditionalism and modernism. The highly disparate tendencies within Islamic ""fundamentalism"" share a desire to re-institute Shar'ia law, regarded as the last bastion of the Islamic ideal of social relations. This book probes the theory and practice of Islamic family law in the contemporary Muslim world, focusing on the dynamics of marriage and the consequences of its breakdown, and the ways in which litigants manipulate the law to resolve marital and child custody...