This chapter discusses an extract from the Iranian legal textbook Mukhtaṣar-i Huqūq-i Khānivādih (‘A Concise Summary of Family Law’) of the Iranian legal scholars Sayyid Ḥusayn Ṣafāyī and Asad Allāh Imāmī. The 42nd revised edition of this text, published in Tehran in 2015, gives an overview of Iranian family law and is aimed specifically at students of law. The 472 pages of the book cover marriage, divorce, parentage, and filiation. This chapter focuses on temporary marriage (commonly known as sīgheh in Persian), which is characterised by the exact determination of the duration of the marriage when contracted. This form of marriage is permitted in Twelver Shī’ī (Imāmī) law, while being strictly rejected in all schools of Sunnī law.

This chapter explores a 2011 Egyptian court case of marriage authentication (ithbāt al-zawāj). Such requests are often filed when the registration of the marriage contract has failed, or in cases in which one party denies the existence of marriage. The text translated in this chapter shows the methods used by judges to fill gaps in the law. The broader historical context is the transformation of Egypt from the 19th century onwards, which period witnessed the emergence of a centralised and hierarchical legal system and the promulgation of law codes inspired by French law, which effectively marginalised Islamic law and its practitioners, a process that continued throughout the 20th century.

This chapter explores the reasoning of al-Mujāhid al-Ṭabaṭabāʾī (d. 1242/1827) in his Manāhil al-Aḥkām as it relates to the question of offer and acceptance (ījāb wa-qabūl) in the context of marriage. Ordinarily, as in contracts of sale, offer would precede acceptance, but because of social norms surrounding marriage (and women’s agency), this order is reversed. The author justifies this reversal in terms of past authorities and custom. The passages excerpted in this chapter discuss how and when this reversal of the expected order might be possible, and in the course of the discussion cover many other important issues, such as whether marriage contracts operate in precisely the same way as other contracts, and the composition of the formulae for offer and acceptance.