CairoBoth parents now lose custody on remarriage.
Egypt’s April bill moved fathers from 16th to 2nd in custody preference; mixed-religion mothers also lose custody when a child turns 7.
Parliament has not scheduled a vote; advocates say the bill leaves too much to judicial discretion.
Sources: Mada Masr
THE HANAFI INHERITANCE
Egypt's family law descends from the Ottoman millet system, which left personal status — marriage, divorce, custody, inheritance — to religious courts. When Egypt codified civil law under Muhammad Ali and later Nasser, it kept personal status under religious jurisdiction even as it secularized commerce and criminal law.
HADANA VS WILAYA
Classical Islamic jurisprudence splits parental authority into two distinct rights: hadana (physical custody and day-to-day care, traditionally favoring the mother during early childhood) and wilaya (legal guardianship over property, education, and major decisions, held by the father). Egyptian law inherited this split; most Western legal systems do not have it.
THE AGE-7 THRESHOLD
In the Hanafi school — the madhhab that shaped Ottoman and Egyptian codification — a mother's hadana over a son traditionally ends around age 7 (some scholars say 9 for daughters), after which custody shifts to the father. Egypt extended this to 15 in 2005 reforms. The new bill's mixed-religion clause reverts to the older threshold for one specific class of mother.
THE REMARRIAGE RULE
The classical fiqh principle that a mother loses custody upon remarrying a non-relative dates to concerns about a stepfather's authority over another man's child. Applying the rule symmetrically to fathers is novel — it equalizes the penalty without removing it, which is what advocates mean by 'equality in injustice.'
JUDICIAL DISCRETION AS A FEATURE
Egyptian personal status courts have historically been given wide latitude to weigh 'the child's interest' — a phrase that lets individual judges import their own social conservatism. Advocates flag this not as a bug to be fixed but as the mechanism by which laws written ambiguously become harsh in practice.
THE COPTIC DIMENSION
Egypt's roughly 10% Coptic Christian minority falls under separate personal status rules administered through the Coptic Orthodox Church, which permits divorce only for adultery or conversion. Mixed-religion marriages — typically a Muslim father and Christian mother, since the reverse is legally restricted — fall through every jurisdictional crack the bill widens.