Home Truths: A Global Report on Equality in the Muslim Family

Home Truths assembles evidence from national groups in thirty countries to challenge the claim that inequality in Muslim family law is divinely fixed. Marriage, divorce, maintenance, guardianship, custody, and inheritance vary widely across jurisdictions. That variation is itself an argument: these laws are human interpretations shaped by states, colonial codification, legal schools, and political struggle.

Musawah’s framework brings together four sources of reasoning—Islamic teachings, universal human rights, constitutional guarantees, and women’s lived realities. The approach refuses two dead ends: treating religion as immune from equality claims, or treating religious commitment as an obstacle that must disappear before reform is possible. Women’s testimony tests whether legal ideals produce justice in actual family life.

Because the report is comparative and movement-oriented, it cannot substitute for current country-level legal advice; several laws have changed since 2009. Its continuing value is strategic. It gives activists evidence that alternative legal arrangements already exist in Muslim contexts and helps separate sharia as an ethical horizon from fiqh and statute as revisable human work. Equality becomes both necessary and demonstrably possible.