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Journalism of Courage
Unlike in India, Pakistan men cannot divorce their wives by merely uttering the word talaq three times. So is the practice in a majority of the Muslim countries.
The NCW, in its recent report ‘‘Welfare of Muslim Women’’, has attempted to generate awareness by cataloguing progressive laws on divorce and marriage in other Muslim countries after it found that the ‘‘triple talaq’’ practice has been widely misused in India with intimations of divorce sent in even through telegrams and e-mails.
In Pakistan, oral talaq — where a husband can unilaterally end his marriage by pronouncing the word talaq thrice — was banned in 1961.
All divorces have to be obtained through family courts after a proper legal notice to the wife and after the separation period of 90 days. Also, a man cannot remarry until he has a written consent from his first wife. Even then he would have to get approval for the second marriage from a family court or else the marriage is not legal.
The NCW says it is aiming at a nationwide circulation of the report through NGOs, the state women commissions and even Muslim organisations like the Wakf boards.
Nafisa Hussein, member, NCW, who worked on the document, told The Indian Express that Indian Muslim women were in the most disadvantageous position since neither the community leaders nor the clergy were ready to inform them of their rights.
‘‘There is a huge social problem on the ground created by oral talaq as lakhs of women are left to fend for themselves for no fault of theirs,’’ she said. She added that ‘‘divorces are given on grounds as flimsy as the woman’s audacity to take the children to get a polio vaccination’’.
She said creating awareness about other Islamic societies would help fight the propaganda that the Shariat laws could not be interpreted or changed.
In countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, even a second marriage is banned.
However, in countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria and Bangladesh, second marriages are discouraged through a strict legal and administrative mechanism.
Unlike in India, where Muslim women have no right to divorce, in Turkey and Iran, both husband and wife enjoy equal rights for seeking divorce. In Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, government officials have to prove that they had gone for a divorce only after having made serious efforts to patch up their differences with their spouse. In all these Islamic countries, divorce is final only after a court verdict.
Again Turkey, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran and Bangladesh have legally banned one-sided divorces, which gave men arbitrary powers to break marriages, while countries like Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh had banned the practice of triple talaq long ago.
