Rachel M. Scott is Chair of the Department of Religion and Culture and Professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Her areas of research include Islamic political thought, modern Islamic law, constitutions, the role of religious scholars in Islam, personal status law, Muslim-Christian relations, and, more recently, Muslim-Jewish relations. Her geographical focus is Egypt, and, more recently, Morocco. She has published two books: The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State (Stanford University Press, 2010)and Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making (Cornell University Press, 2021), along with a number of articles and book chapters. Professor Scott studied at Oxford University (BA, MPhil) and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (PhD).
The following interview touches on Professor Scott’s background, the story of Islamic law in modern Egypt, the Wasaṭiyya intellectual movement, religion and violence, Christian-Muslim relations, Coptic Orthodox personal status law, and Egyptian constitutionalism. The interview was conducted with Dr. Matthew Anderson, executive editor for Dialogue Across Borders.
Excerpt I
MA: One thing that strikes me about that particular conversation is the way that gender and gender relations continue to be a point of almost polemical engagement between Islam and Christianity.
RS: Yes, it showed up in the constitutional debates after the revolution. Certain articles were labeled as Islamist and patriarchal. And yet, these articles were actually quite continuous with articles that were in previous constitutions, but they were utilized to criticize the Muslim Brotherhood. The 2014 Constitution did make a greater commitment to the political representation of women, but there were other areas in which gender was used by each side claiming to be better than the other.
MA: Just to touch on this question of Christian family law—you highlighted that there is a new code that is under discussion. Do you have a sense of how long this discussion has been going on? I know you've been studying this for a fair number of years and have written on Coptic Orthodox approaches toward divorce. Can you give us a sense of how you see that conversation having unfolded in the last decade or so, and whether or not you have any expectations about it?
RS: The divorce issue is very interesting. I might be wrong on the actual details of what is being implemented now, but the Coptic personal status law of 1938 was written by the laity and was much more liberal on questions of divorce, actually going back to Ibn al-ʿAssāl's ecclesiastical laws on divorce from the twelfth century. It was more "Islamic" in the sense that the marital bond was not unbreakable. There were a number of justifications for divorce. When the communal courts were nationalized, the bylaws of 1938 were applied by the national courts and sometimes by Muslim judges in relation to Christians.
However, a shift happened when Pope Shinūda III (d.2012) held to the principle that there were no grounds for divorce except in the case of adultery, drawing on the Gospel of Matthew. He issued a papal decree in 1971 to that effect, but the courts refused to apply the papal decree. Tension between the church and the courts evolved, and gradually the church became more stringent about applying this principle that there is no divorce except in the case of adultery, even though the courts sometimes divorced Christian couples on the basis of the position outlined in the 1930s. Some Christian couples got divorced by the courts, but they couldn't remarry in the Church. The Egyptian parliament refused to respond to requests for a new Christian personal status law. The Church wanted to bring to fruition this papal decree in a new personal status law, but the state refused. If we move forward to 2008 or 2010, there was a standoff between the church and the state. Some Coptic Christians petitioned the courts for the right to be married in the church. One court tried to force the church to remarry, and the church refused. At that point Pope Shinūda became bolder. The court backed down, and then, during the revolution, Article 3 was introduced into the Constitution of 2012 and maintained in the Constitution of 2014, which stated that the principles of religious laws of Christian and Jewish Egyptians are the main source for the legal regulation of their personal status affairs, religious affairs, and nomination of their religious leaders. This was a massive gain for the Coptic Orthodox Church, which then utilized this constitutional commitment to consolidate the standoff that it had with the courts. The Church then petitioned for coming up with its own bylaws, which it did. These bylaws then had to be a part of the national personal status law. The process has gone on for years, but I think it is nearing the end. That’s a kind of culmination of this increased assertion of the Coptic Orthodox Church regarding laws related to divorce, as well as its assertion vis-à-vis the state that kind of began with the papal decree of 1971 and continued in 2008 and 2010, leading up to this constitutional article dealing with the personal status.
Excerpt II
MA: I want to return to this question of the Wasaṭiyya intellectuals. What makes someone a part of that group? Are they individuals who self-identify with the Islamist project, whatever that may entail, and hold more nuanced views on how it could be implemented? There is a part of me that wonders, couldn't any major al-Azhar scholar, working in any of their major institutions, be considered a Wasaṭiyya scholar trying to find ways to mediate between tradition and modernity?
RS: That's a really good question. I've been thinking more about it as I am working on Muḥammad ʿImāra (1931-2020). I would say that the main people who have been associated with the Wasaṭiyya movement were Tārek al-Bishrī (1933-2021), Muḥammad Salīm al-ʿAwā (b.1942), Fahmī Huwaīdī (b.1937), and maybe Aḥmad Kamāl Abū al-Majd (1930-2019). This is a generalization, but there is a strand within their thinking that really emphasizes going back to the original sources and not paying as much heed to the juristic tradition of the four schools of law. There is a tendency to emphasize the need to go back to the Qur'ān and the Sunna and deemphasize Islamic jurisprudence, i.e. to emphasize the need for a fresh interpretation of the texts, interpretations that might be different from how Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal or al-Shāfiʿī interpreted them. Within the Wasatiyya, there tends to be a greater sense of independence from this tradition, while those intellectuals who are part of al-Azhar tend to have more deference to the four schools of law, although there are many overlaps. This idea of being independent from the juristic tradition is seen in some comments from the Muslim Brotherhood which has drawn on the ideas of the Wasatiyya. Some of them have argued that Muslims don't need al-Azhar. They say that Muslims didn't have al-Azhar in the year 720 CE and ask why Muslims would need al-Azhar today. There was this tension within the Muslim Brotherhood organization about what authority to give to al-Azhar. The Muslim Brotherhood issued a party platform in 2007 that gave much more authority to the scholars, and then there was a reaction from members of the organization who were against that.
Going back to the question of the Wasaṭiyya, what really drives them is this modern vision, but also this kind of independence from the Azharite judicial tradition. But then we go to Muḥammad ʿImāra, whom I sometimes associate with the Wasaṭiyya, he is more complex. He is quite interesting, because for decades he was a member of al-Azhar's Islamic Research Academy. He also became a member of the Senior Council of Scholars a few years before he died. He therefore was part of the al-Azhar establishment. I'm delving into his thinking on the concept of consultation (Ar. shūrā) in his book Islam and Human Rights: Obligatory Necessities, which he wrote in 1989. It's an interesting work because he's clearly very knowledgeable about the four schools of law, but he is also very independent, in the sense that he takes a very critical perspective on what religious scholars have done regarding the concept of consultation, democracy, opposition and accountability within Islamic history. He thinks they didn't do a good enough job, that they encouraged people to be passive and overly obedient to their rulers. He asserts some independence from this tradition.
