Issues Home About Contact Us Issue 9 - May 2014 عربى
Regional Developments

Muslim Women`s Rights to Land & Property

With only about 2% of the world’s land registered in the name of women, realizing a “right to land” for women everywhere remains a challenge. Women’s relationship to land also sheds light on the normative content of such a right, which is much less about property, but overwhelmingly the subject of equity. Changing the equation toward equity requires changing the minds of women, men, communities, policy makers and legislators, land administrators, planners, researchers, civil society groups, traditional and religious leaders, and all those with a stake in land, as users, administrators, or providers. Meanwhile, all state parties have a stake in justice.

The Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) is a global effort of interested parties hosted at UN-Habitat headquarters (Nairobi). Since 2006, GLTN has sought to develop context-specific tools and methods to facilitate access to land for women. However, already in 2005, the Arab Preparatory Meeting for the third World Urban Forum (Cairo)endorsed an initiative to study and develop Islamic land tools. In 2007, HIC-HLRN joined an expert group meeting on “Cross Fertilisation of Universal and Islamic Land Approaches” organized by UN-Habitat and the University of East London. There, particpants adopted a resolution on the proposed Islamic land mechanism, and GLTN since has developed capacities of key partners on Islamic land principles and pro-poor and gender sensitive land approaches for the Muslim world, including an innovative training curriculum in cooperation with the International Islamic University of Malaysia. Through these deliberations, Islamic economic, social and cultural rights principles have proved a fertile ground for developing specific tools to increase access to land for women in Muslim communities.

HIC-HLRN has taken several initiatives to develop this ESC rights culture consistent with Islamic ethics and in Muslim countries. Not least of these was an initiative in 2002 with the Arab Women’s Habitat Network, a group of professional planners in government service who had provided a baseline survey of women and housing for Habitat II (1996). The modest research outcomes of this initiative in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Yemen demonstrated  that women’s tenure and equal (or greater) inheritance of housing and land depends entirely very local traditions, and generalizing about Muslim women’s access to housing and land is elusive.

HIC-HLRN’s coordination office (Cairo) has engaged in researched the links between principles of equity in global human rights and Islam since its inception in 2000. Beyond the Arab world, this has led to lessons arising from Islamic Liberation Theology and the human rights activism of Muslim across HIC’s Asian membership. These lessons have shown how civil society initiatives have pursued the evolving Islamic concept of rights (al-haq) consistent with the axiom of Islamic scholar Ibn Qiyam al-Jawziyya[ابن قيم الجوزية]هـ–751 هـ / 1292م–1349م)  691): “Don’t fail to  change rulings with changing times” (لا يُنْكَرُ تغيّرُ الأحكامِ بتغيُّرِ الأزمانِ).

HIC-HLRN experience also has showed how certain inheritance and tenure practices may be popularly perceived as Islam based, but may, in fact, derive from other traditions and habits. Inspiring and thought provoking is the ijtihad(Islamic exegesis) that interprets Qur`ānic precepts of women’s inheritance rights to form a minimum, a floor, not a maximum, or ceiling, of which women are entitled. As with the human right to land itself, the universal principal of al-`adl(justice, equity) stands as the primary operative criterion.

During the mandate of UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing Miloon Kothari, HIC-HLRN conducted two regional consultations that engaged Arab women in the Middle East (Alexandria, 2004) and the Mediterranean Basin (Barcelona, 2006). That experience also highlighted a variety of local practices and legal systems, ranging from patriarchal tenure practices to gender-blind civil codes and affirmative actions affecting women’s housing and land tenure. Ultimately, the patterns of Arab women’s land tenure do not significantly differ from the global pattern.

However, Arab and other Muslim societies in the MENA region constitute no more than 15% of the world’s Muslims. Thus, MENA Muslims form a numerical periphery of practice, and the actual Islamic community of practice is vastly larger.

Most recently, HIC-HLRN joined a GLTN brainstorming session on priority land tools, in Cairo, on 2–4 March 2014, in preparation to the International Women Day. A very diverse group of men and women shared lessons, identified opportunities, and identified key tool development areas to be explored.

In a highly interactive fashion and using asocratic Action Learning methodology (μαιευτικη), GLTN partners UN-Habitat, the Urban Training and Studies Institute, the University of East London, GIZ, the Union of Arab Surveyors, Habitat International Coalition and participants from other institutions from the Muslim world deliberated and concluded that women in the Muslim world would benefit from:

1. Increased awareness on Islamic land principles and human rights that are protecting the rights to land and property for different categories of women;

2. Clarity and information on inheritance for women, including rights granted by Islamic land law and compensatory mechanisms that can complement inheritance provisions to grant access to land and property for women;

3. Information on land and property regimes that are accessible by different categories of women and their children, especially during and after marriage (e.g. marital property).

4. Mechanisms that ensure the protection of women land and property rights (and their social and economic dimension) during land processes, such as urban expansion, land subdivision and consolidation, slum upgrading, resettlement, land readjustment and others.

To know more and engage in this process click here..

 


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