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This chapter explores recent struggles for gender parity in Israel. At the level of national politics, efforts to secure gender quotas in the parliament have largely failed. Some struggles for gender parity in the religious sphere have been more successful, however. Religious Jewish and Muslim women reject the idea that they need to choose between ‘your religion or your rights’, and have increasingly established their right to shape the norms of their religious community. For example, Muslim women have secured the right to have women appointed as arbitrators within Shari’a family courts; and Jewish women have secured the right to elect judges to rabbinical courts. These efforts are, to date at least, limited in scope, leaving significant forms of gender discrimination in place. However, the chapter nonetheless argues that these bottom-up struggles for gender parity within the religious sphere are significant movements towards reconciling gender equality and multiculturalism.

This chapter looks at judgeship. It further develops the ideal of presence as it relates to shari'a court processes and to governmental practice under the imams. The vocabulary of zulm is precisely that utilized in shakwas. Proper conduct of the muwajaha style of government depended on the elimination and avoidance of barriers between ruler and ruled. A judge's personal knowledge of particular people and their affairs constituted an important and recognized basis for judicial action. A judge had to concern himself mainly with 'urf that was relevant to the applied shari'a. For judges as for ruling imams, the basic public muwajaha, the open court encounter, implicitly required the acquisition of a spectrum of informal knowledge. A further assessment of changes and continuities in the shari'a courts must take account of innovations introduced in the Ottoman period.

This chapter argues that Ottomans were an imagined empire in Upper Egypt. There was a reversed case of the core/periphery relationship: the consumerist imperial core was dependent on a capitalist periphery. Furthermore, when the empire attempted to make an actual appearance in the south, its presence only brought about environmental crises, including the onset of the plague, and eventually triggered subaltern rebellion. The chapter follows the formation of government and economic systems that existed under the independent tribal regime of the south. This state reached its maturity in the eighteenth century, under the government of the legendary Hammam, which almost amounted to an early “republic”—as contemporary French observers asserted.