Omm Ahmed, an Egyptian woman living in the impoverished south, has given up on an inheritance left to her by her father after a yearslong fight with her uncle to claim it. Egypt recently passed a law that imposes jail terms and fines on people like Omm Ahmed’s uncle — but in a conservative society such as ours, women who take relatives to court could face being disowned by their families, Heba Saleh writes for the Financial Times. A move in Tunisia to split inheritance equally between men and women, which had sparked some hope for gender equality in the MENA region, is moving slowly through the legislative process, and conservative voices are arguing it’s anti-Islamic. According to Islamic law, male children are to receive twice the share of female children when it comes to inheritance — in many cases though, women are left with nothing at all and no one to fight for them.

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