“Exiting from Within”: Navigating Shari’a Courts and the Right to Exit in Non-Liberal Communities
In liberal multiculturalist discourse, the accommodation of non-liberal minority communities relies heavily on the “right to exit”. Yet, socio-legal and feminist scholarship has long shown that formal exit mechanisms collapse under intersecting structural, cultural, and economic pressures, turning religious divorce into an “exiting without an exit”. This project contributes to post-secular feminism by examining a transformative counter-phenomenon among young Palestinian Bedouin women in Israel: “exiting from within”. Rather than choosing absolute cultural assimilation or enduring prolonged entrapment, an increasing cohort of young Bedouin women are actively initiating short-duration marital dissolutions. The innovation of this research lies in its two-phase temporal comparative design, contrasting historical Shari’a court records (2006-2018) with contemporary fieldwork in the Naqab. The project conceptualizes the Beersheba Shari’a Court as a complex post-secular space, mapping how a new generation of Bedouin women leverages its institutional framework to execute early, fast-tracked divorces within the boundaries of religious law. This study advances post-secular feminist and legal pluralism theories by demonstrating how vulnerable sub-minorities repurpose religious tribunals as instruments of agency, complicating liberal narratives about exit and emancipation.