Women's Rights and the Changing Incentives for Fatwas

As I wrote recently the High Court in Bangladesh has deemed fatwas and other extrajudicial punishment illegal.  Indeed, it has ruled that those who issue fatwas are now subject to punishment.  This is good news.  But the results that the ruling might seem to promise may be a long time coming.

In the first instance the ruling against fatwas affirms the rule of law by laying out real costs to engaging in that kind of extrajudicial behavior. Second, it affirms that women who are the victims of this type of religiously tainted, though long socially supported punishment have a voice to seek restorative justice.  The village committees that decide fatwas often denounce woman who stand apart from the provincial, male dominated community in which they might live under some duress: social campaigners, entrepreneurial women are often punished under flimsy, overwrought charges.  In short, this ruling offers a chance to change that kind of  this ruling offers a chance to change the broader incentive structure that sanctions familial and communal violence toward women.

How this will happen is a different and maybe more important question. In countries like Bangladesh– and to a much greater degree Pakistan, especially the tribal regions– planned social and political development stands or falls with the extent to which the central government can extend and exercise its authority.  Where the central government has determinative authority, there local power politics is less likely to capture local institutions.

Thus, one might observe a lower incidence of fatwas against women in villages that surround major metropolitan areas.   Women who have been punished in that way, will be able to go to the nearest police station and that police station will be more interested in acting in line with the ruling–maybe because they will be less beholden to village elders– than some other police station in some village in the middle of nowhere.

However, as more and more villages fall into line, more conservative village leaders that might otherwise act according to their long-held customs, might resist adopting the ad hoc punishment to which they have, till now, availed themselves.  Someone might pass along word that the neighboring villagers might call in the village leader’s denunciation of a strong-willed woman, unencumbered by social constraints.   It is this virtuous contagion that will finally structure an equilibrium scenario, where along with their endowments, women of Bangladesh can finally face down the many indignities they now suffer.