Sunni Drafting Committee Meetings

In August 2007, the Bahraini Women's Union formulated a committee of academic and judicial scholars which represent the most important juristic, political and cultural currents in Bahrain.  The committee was formulated to review the Sunni draft of the law and submit the resulting notes to the royal palace and the two houses of parliament and create a juristic consensus on enacting a law among multiple Sunni schools and movements, such as Malikis, Salafists, Sufis, and Muslim Brothers.

The committee held a total of 38 meetings which were concluded in June 2008. The committee approved some articles of the law as they were drafted, and amended or rephrased other articles, taking into account the personal status laws of Qatar, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Kuwait, and Oman, and local public notes on the draft law.

The committee produced a series of recommendations, the most notable of which were: inclusion of a preliminary chapter explaining the terms used in the law; addition of articles on issues that had been ignored by the draft, such as ’iylaa’ (conditioned declaration by the husband to divorce), dhihaar (declaration by the husband to prohibit intercourse with his wife) and li‘aan (an oath of condemnation between spouses); articles to deal with new family issues, such as new forms of marriage; and the establishment of two independent systems of family rulings for the Sunni and Ja‘fari sects.