Changing God’s Law: The Dynamics of Middle Eastern Family Law

This volume, edited by Nadjma Yassari, a leading authority in the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern law and especially family law, is the outcome of a conference held in Hamburg in 2013. It has the strengths and weaknesses of this type of publication. Regarding the latter, one can mention a certain degree of heterogeneity, which cannot be totally masked by the four-part structuration of the book. In addition, there is the very partial coverage of the very broad topic-change in family law-considered in an area, the Middle East, that is also broad and used in its widest sense, from Morocco to Pakistan. With regard to the strengths, one should emphasize the exceptional quality of the contributors, on the one hand, and the general framing of the question addressed by the volume, on the other. The latter follows the three pillars of the research group organized in the Hamburg Max-Planck Institute: interdisciplinarity, comparison, and attention to procedural law. As is often the case with collections, our review will proceed piecemeal