1 Casting Off Egyptian Ḥanafism Die Welt Des Islams (2020) 1-35 | doi:10.1163/15700607-00600A06 Die Welt des Islams 59 (2020) 1-35 Casting Off Egyptian Ḥanafism: Sharīʿa, Divorce, and Legal Reform in 20th-Century Egypt Samy Ayoub The University of Texas at Austin sayoub@austin.utexas.edu Abstract This article explores an important debate on divorce law in early 20th-century Egypt between the sharīʿa judge Aḥmad Muḥammad Shākir (d. 1958) and the adjunct to the last Shaykh al-Islām of the Ottoman Empire, Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī (d. 1952). The debate is centred on Shākir’s argument that triple divorce (three pronouncements of the divorce oath in one utterance, deemed irrevocable according to the Ḥanafī school) should be treated as a single revocable divorce, a position that the Ḥanafī school rejects. The Egyptian divorce law was changed on 10 March 1929 to embrace the revised position, supported by the government, that a triple divorce counts as a single divorce, thereby making it revocable. Shākir argued that the official adherence of the sharīʿa courts to the preponderant opinions (al-rājiḥ) of the Ḥanafī school was one of the key obstacles to meaningful legal reform in this case. Despite his declared following of the Ḥanafī school, Shākir dismissed Ḥanafī legal norms and authorities, and advocated an urgent break with the control of the Ḥanafī legal school on the process of judicial rea- soning in the Egyptian sharīʿa courts. To further demonstrate this dynamic, I take up a close reading of a court decision on whether custody payments (ujrat al-ḥaḍāna) include housing support (sakan), or if the latter is a separate calculated expense. Shākir not only ruled in opposition to the Ḥanafī preponderant position but also rejected the late Ḥanafī authority Muḥammad Amīn ʿĀbidīn’s (Ibn ʿĀbidīn, d. 1836) effort to harmo- nize the school’s position on this matter. I propose that Shākir was an iconoclastic Ḥanafī. Keywords Egypt – divorce law – Aḥmad Shākir – Muḥammad al-Kawtharī – Ḥanafī school © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15700607-00600A06 brill.com/wdi Downloaded from Brill.com03/02/2020 02:43:51PM via University of Texas at Austin