Why Egypt's new family law could leave women without rights to marital wealth

Taragy Suleiman never thought of the hours she spent in her kitchen as work. After finishing the housework and tending to her three girls in her modest flat in Egypt's Alexandria, she would stay up late kneading fava bean dough, slicing potatoes and vegetables for the ful and falafel cart her husband ran in the city's Airport district.

For 14 years, she worked alongside him as the cart grew from a mobile stall into a permanent shop, pouring in her labour and her savings. The business was registered in his name alone, but she never saw that as a threat. They were building something together.

When the marriage ended, she had nothing to show for it.

"For years, he insisted I stay behind the scenes, away from the customers. I believed it was out of love," the 56-year-old told The New Arab. She later understood that staying invisible had made her contribution impossible to prove and easy to erase.

She was left without income, without assets, and with three children to support.

"The hardest part was not the loss. It was realising I had no proof."

The despair of that period pushed her toward thoughts she does not recount easily — of ending her life and her children's, out of fear they would be left destitute.

She pulled back, has since been working as a cleaner in a public school to fend for her children, but the question stayed with her: how does a woman prove what she gave, when no one was watching?

Taragy's situation is not an isolated case. With 1.7 million family cases pending before Egyptian courts – the majority disputes over financial rights after divorce – and a sweeping new personal status law referred to parliament on 4 May 2026, the question of what a wife's financial contribution to a marriage is legally worth has moved from the margins of jurisprudence to the centre of a national argument. 

The new law, a 355-article code consolidating five fragmented pieces of century-old legislation, has united feminists and fathers' rights advocates in shared rejection, both arguing it fails to address how marital contributions are recognised when a marriage ends.

At the heart of that failure is a concept known as Haq Al-Kadd Wal-Sa'aya: the right earned through toil and effort.

Rooted in Maliki Islamic jurisprudence, the principle holds that a wife who contributes – through her income, her labour, or both – to building marital assets has a claim to a share of those assets beyond the standard divorce settlement.

In 2022, Egypt's Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Ahmed El-Tayeb, publicly called for the concept to be revived, describing it as essential to protecting working women who had contributed to building their husband's wealth. 

Yet, it remains absent from the law Egypt is now preparing to pass.

The invisible workforce

According to Lamia Lotfy, a researcher specialising in women's rights, this debate is inseparable from Egypt's economic deterioration. 

Since 2016, the Egyptian pound has lost more than 80 percent of its value against the dollar, with three successive devaluations accelerating the collapse.

Inflation peaked at 31.9 percent in early 2023, with food prices rising more than 60 percent year on year.

As Egypt's economic crisis deepened, women's financial contributions to household survival became more economically significant even as they remained largely invisible: Egypt's female labour force participation rate stands at approximately 17 percent — well below the global average of 51 percent – because much of women's economic activity occurs in informal settings, family businesses, and unpaid labour that falls outside official measurement.

"Egyptian personal status law contains no provisions regulating wealth accumulated during marriage," Lamia tells The New Arab.

"The legal default is that each spouse's finances are entirely separate — with no framework for addressing assets acquired through the joint efforts of both parties," she explains. 

In the bill tabled before parliament, Article 33 introduces an addendum to the marriage contract allowing couples to agree in advance on how shared finances are managed — a provision Egypt's Minister of Justice described as designed to "simplify procedures and replace conflict with amicable solutions." 

But women's rights activists say it doesn't come close to resolving the main issue.

Reda al-Danbouqi, a human rights lawyer specialising in family law, says: "Article 33 is a positive step, but it does not provide adequate protection for wives who contribute to building marital wealth".

He explains that an advance agreement assumes equal bargaining power and legal literacy, but actual application varies significantly.

"Many women's contributions, whether through labour, care, or sacrificed career opportunities, leave no paper trail," he notes.

"Without documentation, there is no legal claim."

Proof of a life's work

Iman Hussein, a teacher who began working four years into her 20-year-long marriage, describes the gap between contribution and ownership precisely.

She willingly paid toward a flat and roughly a third of the cost of a car, but none of it was documented. There was trust in the marriage, so she didn't think twice about it.

"I paid almost a third of the price of one car, and half of another, and part of the flat from my own salary and inheritance. But there was nothing in writing to prove my right," the 42-year-old mother of three tells The New Arab.

She was surprised to learn that both cars were registered in her husband's name, and refrained from demanding ownership because of social pressures and fear of destroying their marriage. When he later made decisions about property they bought without consulting her, she stayed silent.

She kept some bank transfer records but did not believe they were sufficient to establish a legal claim, or to withstand the social cost of pursuing one.

"If there's nothing to prove it, what can you do? People will tell you: don't take your children's father to court. The children won't forgive you."

Mohamed Adly Qadri, a lawyer at the Court of Cassation and the Supreme Constitutional Court, identifies documentation as the structural obstacle.

"The nature of the marital relationship, built on trust, means wives often do not ask for written acknowledgements of their financial contributions while the marriage is ongoing," he tells The New Arab.

At the point of dispute, that trust becomes a liability. He supports the principle of recognising women's contributions but warns that any framework must include clear evidentiary standards.

"The right has to be balanced with the need to protect family stability."

Egypt is not alone in confronting this. Malaysia has long recognised matrimonial property through harta sepencarian — jointly acquired marital assets — with courts weighing both direct and indirect contributions, including unpaid domestic work.

Morocco's 2004 Moudawana reforms went further, allowing couples to agree on managing jointly acquired assets and, in the absence of such agreement, permitting judges to assess each spouse's contribution.

Egypt's proposed addendum follows similar logic, but without the judicial discretion Morocco built in as a safeguard.

For Taragy Suleiman, the stability she was told to protect was one in which her work disappeared into her husband's business and her silence became evidence against her.

She does not oppose the new law. She simply wants to know whether it would have done anything for her — and whether the women still behind the counter, still staying out of sight, will fare any differently.

"There was nothing written. And if there's nothing written, what can you do?"

Menna El-Nagi is an Egyptian journalist specialising in solutions journalism and social issues. She writes for a number of Arab and international media platforms