Gender Equality in Muslim-Majority States and Shari’a Family Law: Is There a Link?

This paper employs a newly developed coding of the degree to which Muslim-majority states incorporate a strict version of Shari’a family law into their legal code. This measures the feature of Islamic tradition, which is hypothesised to impede women's sociopolitical equality. I find that the incorporation of a strict version of Shari’a family law is an impediment to sociopolitical gender equality; however, the inclusion of other laws and policies based on Islamic tenets is not. Furthermore, the negative effect of an oil-dependent economy does not hold in the subset of Muslim-majority states once Shari’a family law inclusion is accounted for. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]