Deconstructing the East/West Binary: Substantive Equality and Islamic Marriage in a Comparative Dialogue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION In the scholarship dedicated to legal transplants, the binary East/West permeates the images and understanding of the ways in which Islamic legal rules travel, penetrate, and get received by the West in a comparative law dialogue. Differences are thus being assigned between the legal regimes of the East and the West, two entities considered as sharply divided. This chapter seeks to understand the politics of transnational Islamic family law in Canada, the United States, France, and Germany, through the migration of one particular Islamic legal institution: Mahr, “the gift which the bridegroom has to give to the bride when the contract of marriage is made and which becomes the property of the wife.” The issue of Mahr typically presents itself in a crisis: a married Muslim woman, engaged in a religiously structured marriage, and living in a Western liberal state, reaches out to the secular court upon the dissolution of her marriage to claim the enforcement of Mahr, presumably because her husband has previously refused to give her the amount of deferred Mahr. Through an analysis of the case law, I explore the ways in which substantive equality is being used by courts to accept or root out Islamic law from the family of institutions that are deemed appropriate in Western countries. What influences the selection and imposition of Mahr as a gendered institution? How does law shape substantive equality in a comparative religious framework? Does the way Mahr travels affect gender equality, in both productive and reactive terms?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".