For years, Egypt’s personal status laws have been politically and socially fraught legal issues, with family law organized around religious identity and clerical authority. Now, the Egyptian government is advancing a set of reforms that it says will modernize custody arrangements and resolve long-standing complaints that the courts, already facing a backlog of cases, are being further clogged by disputes over divorce, custody and remarriage handled through the church rather than a unified civil code.
The proposed reforms emerged after years of public pressure, along with renewed scrutiny following the suicide of Egyptian mother Passant Soliman, whose livestreams describing her custody struggles sparked sympathy and outrage online.
Critics, however, argue that the reforms remain rooted in the same logic that has, for decades, shaped Egypt’s personal status system, which treats marriage and divorce as sectarian and moral struggles rather than individual rights. That means deeply personal matters like who someone can marry, divorce, live with or raise children with remain subject, not only to courts, but to clerical institutions and security politics, not to mention social stigma and communal pressure.
“The state decided to deal with people depending on their religion, their sect and their gender, instead of dealing with them as citizens,” Nada Nashat, a lead coordinator at the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, one of the few civil society organizations that has worked on personal status reform for decades, told New Lines. “And the state does not consider Christians as citizens in the first place.”
In Egypt, Muslims follow Islamic-based family laws, while Christians are governed through church-based regulations which differ by denomination. The proposed Christian family law represents the first serious attempt in modern Egyptian history to create a unified legal framework for Christian personal status issues. But Nashat described the process as deeply restrictive and even exclusionary.
Christian marriages and divorces were historically governed through church bylaws dating back to 1938. Those rules once permitted divorce on nine separate grounds, including adultery, impotence, physical abuse or religious conversion. But under the late Pope Shenouda III, the Coptic church, which represents the vast majority of Christians in Egypt, adopted a far stricter interpretation of marriage, limiting grounds for divorce almost exclusively to adultery or religious conversion.
The current draft law, negotiated between six major churches, modestly expands those grounds while maintaining severe restrictions. Catholics, meanwhile, would effectively still have no access to divorce at all. For some Christians, the result is a legal limbo in which they might be considered divorced by civil courts but still married by the church, preventing remarriage and, in some cases, pushing families to emigrate to rebuild their lives.
“If you’re granting me divorce, will you allow me to remarry as a Christian person?” Nashat said. “They didn’t answer that. … The six churches, they still have an upper hand on the second marriage.”
The proposed law also expands definitions of adultery beyond physical sexual relations, potentially including certain forms of online communication. Critics warn this could deepen social stigma around divorce rather than alleviate it. Nashat also criticized the draft’s treatment of adoption. While adoption is technically permitted within Christian doctrine, the proposed framework instead leans toward Egypt’s “kafala” guardianship system, which is rooted in Muslim legal traditions. She argues that this reflects how state policy often limits Chrisitan autonomy even within sect-specific family laws.
One of the biggest contentions concerns interfaith marriages and custody. Under the proposed framework, a Christian mother married to a Muslim man (or to a Christian man who later converts to Islam) could lose custody once her child turns 7, when the child would automatically be classified as Muslim. Legislators often justify this by arguing that mothers exert greater influence over children’s religious upbringing. “Motherhood doesn’t have a religion,” Nashat said, arguing that Christian mothers should not lose custody simply because of their spouse’s religious choices.
The issue cuts into one of Egypt’s most politically sensitive fault lines: religious conversion. Conversion between Islam and Christianity has long been treated by Egyptian authorities as a state security issue, often triggering intervention from security services, who summon potential converts to explain their reasons.
Reports gathered over several years point to a possible unintended effect of restrictive divorce laws: religious conversions. Some Christian women convert to Islam not out of religious conviction but because it offers one of the only legal pathways out of abusive or unwanted marriages. Under Egyptian law, a Muslim woman cannot remain married to a non-Muslim man. Conversion automatically dissolves the marriage. Such cases have frequently fueled sectarian conspiracy theories within Egypt’s Christian community, where disappearances or conversions are often framed as kidnappings or forced Islamization campaigns.
Nashat argues that the only lasting solution is a unified civil family law applicable to all Egyptians regardless of religion. “The ultimate goal is to have a civil law for everyone,” she said. “People deal with the state as citizens. Religion is between them and God.”
For now, Egypt appears headed toward a more incremental transformation: reforms that address some long-standing grievances while preserving the religious and political architecture that produced them.