Tunisian women's rights traditionalists

Some denounce it as a violation of Islamic law, others embrace it as revolutionary: An initiative by Tunisia's president to make inheritance and marriage rules fairer to women is reverberating around the Muslim world.

The 90-year-old president, Beji Caid Essebsi, argues that Tunisia needs to fight discrimination and modernize. He's gambling that he could shepherd through such changes because his secular party is in a coalition with an Islamist one, and because his country has a history of relatively progressive views toward women.

Essebsi proposed last month allowing women the same inheritance rights as men, instead of the current system based on Shariah law that generally grants daughters only half the inheritance given to sons.
The president also suggested allowing Muslim women to marry non-Muslims; currently Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslims but not the other way around. He announced the creation of a commission led by a woman lawyer and rights activist aimed at drafting revised rules.

Just raising the call for changes is a dramatic move. Mainstream Muslim clerics almost universally see the inheritance rules as enshrined in the Quran and consider the rules on marriage to be equally unquestionable in Shariah. Most Muslim-majority countries in the Mideast and Asia enforce the rules since they use Shariah as the basis for personal status and family law. Some worry that such changes could stir up extremist anger in a country that has already suffered deadly attacks. The president argues that existing practice violates Tunisia's constitution, adopted in 2014 in the wake of the Arab Spring revolution, and that he wants Tunisia to reach "total, actual equality between men and women citizens in a progressive way," as called for in...