h a da s s a h m a g a z i n e · a p r i l / m ay 2 0 1 220

DE

BB

I C

OO

PER

on the status of women in Islam.The challenges Abed Rabho has

overcome are formidable: Thedaughter of an illiterate mother, sheearned a Ph.D. degree; an Arabic-speaker who began studying the He-brew language only in adulthood,she wrote her thesis in Hebrew; sheis blind; a Muslim at an Israeli insti-tution; and a feminist woman re-searcher studying the conservative,male-dominated environment of theIslamic legal system.

AND WHILE HER HANDICAP

has undoubtedly limited heroptions, Abed Rabho dis-

covered one possible advantage: Inthe hundreds of interviews she con-ducted with Muslim women seek-ing recourse from the Sharia (Mus-lim law) courts, she demonstrateda gift for getting them to open up.“Since I am blind, I am perceivedas less of a threat than a sighted woman,” said Abed Rab-ho in an interview at her office at the Harry S. Truman In-stitute for the Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University.“The women I interviewed may have believed that I couldnot identify them again, and their secrets were safe with me.”

Breaking away from an academic tradition of researchbased on written documents, Abed Rabho asked the wom-en at Sharia courts in Jerusalem and Taibe to talk aboutthemselves, what had brought them to the court and

what results they had achieved. Thewealth of information she collectedamazed her colleagues. Abed Rab-ho’s material provided a rare glimpseinto the women’s private lives andplace in society.

“Nobody even cared what thesewomen said before. We were aston-ished by the kind of things theytold her,” said Professor Ruth Ro-ded, Abed Rabho’s Ph.D. adviserand one of the first researchers tostudy women in Islam.

Astute yet soft-spoken, with longjet-black hair framing her fine fea-tures, Abed Rabho tells her storywithout sentimentality. The third ofseven children, she was born in 1957in the village of Beit Safafa on thesouthern edge of Jerusalem, on theJordanian side of the village dividedat the end of the 1948 war. Thefamily’s home remained on the Is-raeli side and they officially became

refugees. The Abed Rabhos lived in a series of rented apart-ments until her father built a new house in 1962. After theSix-Day War in 1967, Israel incorporated the whole villageinto Jerusalem, but the family’s original house, convertedinto an Israeli police station, was never recovered.

Even after the village came under Israeli rule, AbedRabho continued to go to primary and junior high schoolsrun by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency forPalestinian Refugees. She attended a girls’ high school in

Compassion Abed Rabho has been movedto tears by some women’s stories of abuse.

Profile

Laila Abed RabhoThis remarkable scholar learned to translate a disability into an advantage

to become one of the leading authorities on women in Islam today.

By Shoshana London Sappir

Only three miles separate Laila Abed Rabho’s home from Jerusalem’s Hebrew Uni-versity, but she had to travel an extraordinary distance to get there. Abed Rabho, 55,aspired to be a schoolteacher, but the loss of her eyesight changed the course of her life,forcing her to set new goals and reinvent herself. a Today, a leading expert on women’srights in Muslim law, her groundbreaking research at the university has shed new light

020HADA05 3/12/12 4:40 PM Page 20

h a da s s a h m a g a z i n e · a p r i l / m ay 2 0 1 222

Bethlehem and went on to a women’steacher-training college in Ramallah,where she studied to become a scienceand math teacher.

During summer vacation after hersecond year of college, Abed Rabhobegan losing her eyesight. She was di-agnosed with retinal detachment andhospitalized at the St. John of Jerusa-lem Eye Hospital, where she under-

went numerous surgeries, to no avail.“I went into the hospital seeing andcame out blind,” she said simply.

“But thank God I had good par-ents,” she said. “My mother didn’t knowhow to read or write but she knewhow to take care of me and so did myfather.” They took her to the HelenKeller Institute in Bethlehem to learnBraille. “Within two months, I learnedhow to read it in Arabic and Englishbut I didn’t know Hebrew yet.”

Then she returned to school, onlyto be told that she had to change hersubject because the science labs wouldnow be too difficult for her to per-form. She was retrained to teach pri-mary school and graduated with hon-ors, but schools did not want to hirea blind teacher who could not use theblackboard. “I was mad,” she said.“I had earned my diploma, I was ateacher, but what was I going to donow? I did not have a job.”

IN AN EFFORT TO BECOME EMPLOY-able, Abed Rabho went to BirzeitUniversity and earned a bachelor’s

degree in Middle Eastern history. Buteven with her degree in hand, AbedRabho was unemployed for a yearuntil she was hired by a center for theblind, where she taught older womenwith little education. She worked therefor seven years but felt frustrated andoverqualified.

At this point a colleague suggestedshe go for a master’s degree at HebrewUniversity. “I didn’t know the HebrewUniversity took Arab students fromEast Jerusalem,” said Abed Rabho. Bynow in her thirties, she began learn-ing Hebrew and was accepted into aprogram in Islamic studies.

Roded thought fieldwork wouldbe a good way to accommodate Abed

Rabho’s blindness while also takingadvantage of her being a Muslimwoman. Under Israeli law, all mattersof marriage and divorce are governedby religious law, and parallel to thecivil courts are religious ones for thevarious recognized religions.

So Abed Rabho set out to talk towomen.

Her findings were surprising: Thecourts were more attentive than ex-pected to the plight of women suffer-ing in their marriages and likely to findways to help them within the con-straints of Muslim law. In fact, manywomen told Abed Rabho that goingto court had been empowering, giv-ing them a sense of control ratherthan victimhood.

Abed Rabho discovered that manywomen asked for and were grantedchild support without getting divorced.They could demand their husbandsprovide them with separate housing ifthey were uncomfortable living withthe husband’s family. She found thatthe main complaints were interferencefrom the husband’s family, domesticviolence and legal-status issues relat-ed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Laila asked the women whatbrought them to court and how theyknew about their [religious] rights,”said Roded. “She got a lot more thanthe answer to those two questions....She’s sitting on a mass of material no-

body ever thought of asking women.”Abed Rabho says many of the sto-

ries she heard—first sitting in on hear-ings for a full year and then in morethan 200 one-on-one interviews—wereheartbreaking. “Sometimes I wasmoved to tears by the women’s sto-ries. They told me about not havingmoney to feed their children, howtheir husbands beat them and their

children and neglected them, how they[were] physically and emotionallyabused. Some of them said very pri-vate, intimate things that they couldnot say in front of the judge...or eventell their lawyers.”

Abed Rabho learned that despite ageneral decline in young couples livingwith the husband’s family, a housingshortage made independent living im-possible for many. The result was anarray of family conflicts stemmingfrom overcrowding and the couple’sinability to develop an intimate mari-tal relationship. Even though Pal-estinian society is still decidedly patri-archal, the tension was often focusedon the husband’s mother, who manywomen complained exerted too muchcontrol in their lives.

“Everybody thinks of the patriar-chal family where the father has allthe power,” commented Roded. “Af-ter Laila’s research, everybody said,‘Of course: The mother-in-law was ayoung bride being pushed around, andnow it is her turn.’”

Domestic violence was the secondmost common reason women wentto the courts. Many of them learnedfor the first time that in Muslim lawviolence was grounds for divorce.

Another revelation of Abed Rab-ho’s research was the impact the po-litical situation has on women’s lives.A particular phenomenon she discov-

‘Since I am blind, I am perceived as less of a threat,’ AbedRabho said of the interviews she conducts with women.

020HADA05 3/12/12 4:40 PM Page 22

23a p r i l / m ay 2 0 1 2 · h a da s s a h m a g a z i n e

ered was “certificate marriage”: Menfrom the occupied territories weremarrying women from East Jeru-salem or Israel to gain legal priv-ileges and free passage in and out ofIsrael without a special permit.

THE POSITIVE PUBLICITY OF ABED

Rabho’s work was not loston the court administration.

“I think she made a positive contri-bution because she presented theperspective of the Muslim women inthe Sharia court that was never stud-ied before,” said Iyad Zahalkeh, ajudge in the Haifa Sharia court andformer national head of the Shariacourt system. “As opposed to preju-diced views that the courts discrimi-nate against women, [Abed Rabho]presents the courts as places thatdefend women’s rights and protectwomen even against their families.She also helps inform women oftheir rights.”

Indeed, Abed Rabho has taken herexpertise to the field: She qualified asa Sharia pleader, certified by Israel’sSupreme Court to represent womenin Sharia courts; and she meets Mus-lim women’s groups all over the coun-try to teach them about their rights.

Never married, Abed Rabho liveswith her father, younger brother andhis family; her mother passed away ayear ago. Although she requires anassistant for her academic work, sheis largely independent.

On a Thursday morning last sum-mer, Abed Rabho left her house at 6A.M. to address a group of house-wives in northern Israel. She took ataxi to the Jerusalem bus depot, got abus to Tel Aviv, switched to a bus toHadera and was picked up and driv-en to the village of Jatt for the meet-ing. Then she repeated the whole proc-ess in reverse and got home at 5 P.M.

“Laila is one of the experts onwomen’s rights in Islam,” said NaefaSarisi, director of the organization

Women and Horizons, who hostedAbed Rabho in Jatt. She noted thatthe women who attended Abed Rab-ho’s class made an instant connectionwith her. “There are women herewho don’t know their rights, they’relearning about them for the first time.”

Abed Rabho would like to openher own consulting business to helpMuslim women, or perhaps partnerwith a law practice. For the mean-time, she continues to do research andteach women about their rights with-in Sharia law. H

020HADA05 3/19/12 2:34 PM Page 23