Family Law in the South

Yemeni mp

Ahmed Saif Hashed

I studied Family Law at the Faculty of Law. I was—and still am—deeply fascinated by that law to this very day. A law betrayed, just as the South itself was betrayed. A law that once embodied a genuine social breakthrough, only to be strangled with cruelty, with spiteful vengeance, with a dark extremism akin to death—after more than a quarter of a century of its enactment.

Today, women find themselves shackled by a law heavier than iron, darker than night itself. Every right they once gained has been undone. Half of society has been stripped of justice and equality. The South has every right to weep until the heart itself sobs over a loss the size of a homeland. The South has every right to take pride in what once was, and every right to reclaim its law intact. But how can it be reclaimed when it has been booby-trapped, poisoned, stripped, and left blind? How can the South reclaim its own South when it has been fragmented and handed over to the racist, the reactionary, and the mercenary traitor? It is our right—and theirs—to demand a unity free of hyenas. A Yemen where rights are restored, and where the rule of law, justice, and equality prevail.

That law was unparalleled in its fairness—no law across the Arab world could rival it, save perhaps Tunisia’s personal status code under the late President Bourguiba. Today, Yemeni women are governed by a rigid patriarchal law dragged from a bygone age—an age steeped in inertia, dullness, and backwardness. Justice was raped, rights were plundered, and what once was reality has been shattered into fragments and mere dreams. A grave and bitter fate has befallen us. A sword drawn against women, sharper than execution itself. A whip that feeds on the remnants of humanity. Between yesterday and today lies a regret both ruinous and immense.

Family law in the south (1974), a miracle, a source of pride, born in a reality weighed down by backwardness, and encircled by oil, tribalism, and conspiracies. That law, along with its amendments, was a torch of revolution cutting through a dense sea of darkness—ushering in a genuine transformation in both awareness and society. It was the beacon, the flame, across the entire Peninsula and the Gulf.

That law was the social revolution that carved a staggering difference between the past and that era crowned with justice and equality. Today’s reality stands in brutal contrast: a state inverted, upturned, limping on its hands—a wonder stranger than the impossible. What wounds the soul even more is to see the guardians of nationalism and the left searching for a bright future in the cloak of night, or in the pockets and coats of princes and kings. My God—what a setback, what a calamity has befallen us! What curse has struck Yemen, and above all our South, tormented by murderers, thieves, and pretenders alike!

The Family Law in the South, and its amendments, was a dazzling social revolution—denied only by one blinded by cruel patriarchal prejudice, or by a captive of a distant, savage past who lives estranged from his own age and mistakes this estrangement for eternal glory, a right that will not vanish until the end of days.

The foundation was monogamy, with polygamy allowed only as a rare exception. A husband was bound to remain faithful to his wife for life, and no other woman could encroach upon her marriage or her rights. Yet today, some men take not only a second wife, but three, making the first wife share her life, her inheritance, and her very existence with others.

I recall a friend of my father’s in Aden—a merchant—who secretly married another woman. When the secret was revealed, he was tried and sentenced to two years in prison, with no suspension. Cursed be those who destroyed that law, and damnation upon those who overthrew it.

The law fixed the dowry at one hundred dinars—no trade, no bargaining. More than forty years later, women in Yemen have been reduced to commodities, or near commodities, bought and sold as possessions. A wife is expected to submit, to serve, to bear children like a rabbit breeding endlessly—while a man, if he wishes, may wed four women in a single night. Even the feeble and aged may marry a young girl or a minor who scarcely knows how to answer a question, let alone ask one.

Divorce was never at hand’s reach, nor triggered by a slip of the tongue—especially if children were involved. Popular committees did all they could to prevent it, for the sake of the children. Divorce or separation could not occur outside a court of law, and the court would always put the children’s welfare first before ruling on its consequences. But today, with a single word—“divorced”—uttered in a fit of reckless anger, a woman can be cast onto the street, even at sixty years of age, even after bearing ten or more children. And the children are condemned to the hell of divorce, carrying its scars into adulthood.

I still remember, as a law student training in the Court of Sira, when the judge ruled in favor of a woman and her underage children, granting them most of the marital home after separation, along with custody, alimony, and other entitlements. What a time that was—how beautiful the past before it was stolen away.

Back then, a man could not impose his will over a woman—whether in marriage, in choice, in work, in divorce, in custody, or in maintenance. In the South, women were queens compared to what they have become today, under this grim, joyless age. We have not forgotten. We still remember—remember to the point of tears, to the point of rage. There is no escape, no retreat, but to reclaim Yemen from the claws and fangs of hyenas.

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