For Muslim men in India, getting a divorce can be as easy as 1-2-3 — just say the word “talaq” three times.
The practice of talaq-ul-bidat — or “triple talaq” — allows male Muslims in India to end their marriage by saying the phrase, which is increasingly being emailed or texted to women. And despite being frowned upon by strict Muslims and being banned in Pakistan, Bangladesh and throughout the rest of the Muslim world, the custom pervades India, home to the world’s third-largest Muslim population.
But the country’s supreme court now “looks set” to declare triple talaq unconstitutional, as well as another law that forces women who remarry their husbands to first have sex with another man, The Guardian reports.
“It is a totally unilateral, one-sided, instant form of divorce, and uttered by men,” activist Zakia Soman told The Guardian. “The wife need not be present. She need not even be aware.”
Soman, co-founder of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, or Indian Muslim Women’s Movement, said a national study released last year by her organization found that roughly 1 in 11 Muslim women were survivors of triple talaq, with the vast majority receiving no compensation.
“The reason triple talaq has persisted is first and foremost because Indian Muslims are poor, socially backward, economically backward and educationally backward,” she told The Guardian. “As a result, there is a stranglehold by patriarchal elements posing as religious leaders. And they have spread rampant misinformation and misunderstanding.”
A ban on the custom would remove the threat of a “trapdoor divorce” for up to 90 million Muslim women in India, where Muslims can be governed by sharia, or religious law.
“But the law doesn’t state the minimum age of marriage, the procedure for divorce, or polygamy, or the guardianship of children,” Soman said. “The law just says they’ll be governed by sharia. But which sharia? Whose sharia?”
The challenge by Soman’s group to Muslim divorce laws in the country boils down to her belief that she and any other Muslim woman has the same right to interpret the Quran as any cleric or religious scholar.
“Triple talaq is totally un-Quranic,” Soman told The Guardian. “The Quran nowhere has any mention of it. A Muslim marriage is a social contract and the right to divorce is given to both husband and wife.”
‘It is a totally unilateral, one-sided, instant form of divorce, and uttered by men. The wife need not be present. She need not even be aware.’
- Zakia Soman
Meanwhile, the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board filed an affidavit last month arguing that absent the right of instant divorce, a husband “may resort to illegal, criminal ways of murdering or burning [his wife] alive,” The Guardian reports.
One 45-year-old woman told the newspaper she feared hearing the words from her now-former husband for more than a decade.
“If you interfere too much in my life, I’ll give you talaq,” said a woman identified only as Arshiya, recalling the words of her husband when she caught him talking online to other women.
The woman said she actually missed her husband saying he wanted a divorce.
“One day, suddenly, he told me he had given me talaq,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I gave it to you four days earlier.’”
Arshiya continued: “I literally begged him. I went down on my knees and said, ‘If you want to have affairs, go, just don’t throw me out of the house.’ Where will I go with my child? I don’t have a steady job – what will I do?”
Since her husband chose to have an Islamic divorce instead of one under India’s secular laws, Arshiya was denied the one-third of his salary to which she was legally entitled as alimony. She’s now working 16 hours a day as a teacher in Delhi while trying to have her divorce overturned.
“I want justice,” she told The Guardian. “The question now isn’t money. I was not his servant. I was not his slave, who he kept in the house for 12 years and then threw out.”