When the Egyptian government unveiled its draft personal status law, it managed a rare feat in a polarized society: uniting fathers’ rights advocates and feminist activists in shared outrage. The two camps agree on almost nothing about how Egyptian family law should work—but they’ve found unlikely common ground in calling for the bill to be scrapped entirely.
House of Representatives Speaker Hesham Badawi announced Monday that the chamber had received the draft personal status law, along with a companion bill for Christians, referring both to a joint committee. What followed was a swift and withering rejection from virtually every direction.
Egypt’s current personal status law is the family-law framework that governs marriage, divorce, custody, alimony, visitation, and other domestic disputes. The new draft is not starting from zero; it is trying to revise that framework, especially on custody age, remarriage, religion, and financial rights, raising questions about who it protects and who gets squeezed by it.
The custody standoff
At the heart of the controversy is a number: 15. That is the age at which children can currently choose their custodial parent under Egyptian law, and the draft proposes to keep it there. For divorced mothers, that means retaining custody, the marital home, and legally prescribed financial support until then. For fathers, it means years of estrangement that the new draft, despite placing them second in line for custody after mothers, does little to shorten.
Ashraf Tammam, former head of the Cabinet Information Center, was blunt in his assessment. “Today you will find another man raising your children,” he told Al Manassa, “and that other man is raising the children of a third man; men are essentially sitting around raising each other’s children.” The draft’s provision allowing a remarried mother to retain custody until her child turns seven struck him as a particular indignity rather than a compromise.
Lawyer Mohamed El-Ashawy, who is suing the government to compel the submission of a new bill, framed the stakes in starker terms. He recounted a custody dispute that ended with him, a widower, sentenced to a month in prison following a physical altercation with his late wife’s brother over the children—while the brother received a year. He cited another case involving a counselor accused of severing his father-in-law’s finger during a housing possession dispute. These are not isolated anecdotes, he argued, but symptoms of a legal framework producing a chronic crisis. “The least that can be said,” he said of the new draft, “is that this is revenge.”
Feminist activist Ilham Eidarous, co-founder of the Bread and Freedom Party, arrived at a similar verdict from the opposite direction. She described the custody provisions as “patchwork” solutions that reflect a lack of political will to address root causes. The remarriage clause, which she said effectively penalizes both parents for marrying again, was her particular target. “Instead of confronting the issue of the mother’s remarriage, it effectively bans marriage for both parents,” she said. Under the draft’s own logic, a child could be removed from a remarried mother at seven—only to find the father also ineligible for custody if he too has remarried. “This is a solution that increases problems more than it solves them.”
A child’s choice, and who gets to make it
The provision granting children the right to choose their custodial parent at 15 drew fire from both sides, though for opposite reasons. Tammam called it “a crime against the child.” Eidarous said the very discussion of lowering the custody age is what constitutes the real crime.
On the question of overnight hosting rights for the non-custodial parent—a provision Eidarous endorsed as sound in principle—she raised a more practical concern. “What matters is whether hosting can be enforced in practice,” she said. “Where are the executive bodies that will supervise implementation and ensure the child is not harmed or abducted?” She noted that existing court rulings ordering the return of abducted children to custodial mothers already go routinely unenforced because police do not treat them as a priority. “The father who kidnaps a child already faces penalties, but they are not applied, so what guarantees do we have this time?”
Religion, discrimination, and the double standard
Among the draft’s more controversial provisions is one requiring a custodial mother and her children to share the same religion—a clause that applies to mothers but not to fathers. Eidarous called it “an aberration.” “How can a child be deprived of his mother because of a difference in religion?” she asked. “A mother is a mother, and her relationship with her children does not change.” The asymmetry she found particularly telling: “This is clear discrimination against women and very harmful to children. How can the state allow mixed marriage and then deprive the mother of custody for the same reason?”
Engagement contracts and inheritance arithmetic
The draft’s reach extends beyond divorce and custody into the rituals of courtship itself. Tammam warned that new provisions governing the return of the “shabka”—the gold jewelry traditionally given at engagement—and gifts would drag betrothed couples into court before they have even married. His deeper objection was conceptual: the draft treats the shabka as a gift rather than as part of the mahr, the obligatory Islamic bridal gift. “Does a man spend tens of thousands—or hundreds of thousands at today’s gold prices—on a mere gift,” he asked, “or is this part of the mahr?”
He reserved his sharpest criticism for insurance provisions tied to the marriage contract and the distribution of payouts upon a spouse’s death, which he described as “absurd.” The asymmetry bothered him most: under the draft’s terms, a husband’s insurance payout upon his wife’s death flows to her heirs, while the wife collects her husband’s payout in full, excluding his family entirely. “If my wife dies, the money I paid goes to her heirs? But when I die, she takes it all and my family is excluded?”
A rare note of praise
Not everyone found the draft irredeemable. Jawaher El-Taher, director of the Access to Justice Program at the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, acknowledged several positives: clearer rules governing engagements; tighter regulation of polygamy—including a new requirement to notify a first wife; and the placement of fathers second in line for custody, a change her organization had previously advocated. She noted the draft bears a resemblance to a bill her center had submitted under the slogan “More Justice for the Family” in both 2022 and 2026.
But even El-Taher had reservations. Limiting the law’s scope to Muslim Egyptians raises unresolved questions about refugees and dual nationals, she argued, especially given that guardianship provisions over property apply to all Egyptians without distinction. She also took issue with the draft’s exclusive reliance on “the most authoritative opinions of the Hanafi school,” suggesting courts would be better served by drawing on the strongest opinions from across all four Sunni schools of jurisprudence.
The unlikely consensus
The critics—men who feel abandoned by the system and women who feel targeted by it, lawyers who want fewer courts, and activists who want better ones—ultimately converge on one conclusion: the draft should be withdrawn. El-Ashawy called for psychologists, sociologists, and education experts to take over the drafting process, rather than leaving it to “individual opinions,” and urged lawmakers to consider alternative bills submitted by political parties, including the Justice Party.
It is a striking moment of cross-ideological agreement in a debate defined by its divisions—though whether Egypt’s parliament will interpret it as a mandate for something better or simply a mandate to delay remains to be seen.
