many muslim woman are saying that islam is a feminist religion cuz they have apparently more rights that man and they can decide their own spouse, get divorced etc./ is that even remotely true? and what evidence can i show them that islam is misogynistic?
Lol let’s get rid of that “more rights than men” part real quick, the Quran literally says the opposite and the entirety of Islamic history 610 AD-present cements the point. Call me when they discover a magic alternate Quran that gives women twice the inheritance share of men, twice the say in court, the ability to beat their husbands, and the ability to possess four husbands and infinite male sex slaves. Like… the DELUSION of people who try this, girl I–
But marriage and divorce! Let’s launch into an unexpected lesson in fiqh. As always, I’d recommend reading an actual book about this topic if you’re really curious, but I can summarize it. If you are a young lady in the Abbasid caliphate in the 10th century or so–or one unfortunate enough to live in a modern place where secular laws and customs haven’t overridden Islamic ones–how do you get married under Islamic law, given that the religion prohibits physical contact with unrelated men and romantic escapades aren’t allowed?
Well, the first thing to do is get yourself a male guardian. Just kidding–one’s already been assigned to you, you don’t get to choose, LOL! It’s probably your dad or grandpa or whoever else is available. They will find you someone to marry. It will probably be someone from your extended family and it may be your first cousin. Sorry. If it makes you feel better, his parents are probably “encouraging” him to marry you just like yours are “encouraging” you to marry him. Mothers/grandmothers/etc certainly may be involved in this process, but theologically speaking their involvement is informal; the agreement must formally be through the girl’s male guardian:
No woman should arrange the marriage of another woman, and no woman should arrange her own marriage.
The only school to even partially disagree with this is the Hanafi school, in which some jurists believe that mature women can arrange marriages, even though it’s not ideal. But even they say that a marriage arranged without the consent of the woman’s male guardian can be overruled by that guardian if he determines it is unacceptable. Not all Hanafis agreed with letting women arrange marriages, and none of the other schools of jurisprudence agreed with it, since it flies in the face of Islamic tradition. And Mohammed’s own views of the matter seem pretty straightforward.
Any woman whose marriage is not arranged by her guardian, her marriage is invalid, her marriage is invalid, her marriage is invalid.
Now, according to essentially all schools of Islamic jurisprudence, fathers/grandfathers/whatever have the legal authority or ijbar to agree to marriages on behalf of their minor children. “Minor” here is defined as pre-pubescent. So if you’re a really young girl, congratulations, you are now on your way to getting married and have zero say in the matter. At least your husband is meant to wait until you get your period before he rapes you for the first time. Feminism!
If instead you are deemed to no longer be a minor–ie you’ve started going through puberty–your outlook is a bit better under some schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Virgins who are not minors, you see, must be asked for their consent to the marriage. They do not actually have to give it…. but they have to be asked, according to a hadith.
a virgin should not be married until her consent is sought, and her consent is her silence
Some schools of Islamic jurisprudence say this only applies if you’re acting as the male guardian of someone who is not your own daughter, and otherwise you don’t have to ask her. But let’s assume you’re lucky enough to live in an area dominated by one of the other schools.
You have two options here. You could say “absolutely NOT!”… but you probably know better than to do that. Presumably you are a typical medieval Arab girl and you do not want your family to yell at you and call you a disgrace for rejecting a marriage. Nor do you want them to pressure you into marrying another guy who’s even worse than your cousin, which they may do to get rid of you–a girl remaining an unwed virgin for too long brings shame to a family, after all. So when your father informs you that he has arranged a marriage with your cousin, you just sit there and stare at the floor. Congratulations! You have now “consented” to the marriage and are in the same position as your hypothetical pre-pubescent counterpart.
The one bright spot here is if you’re not a virgin. You are, I am sure, a morally upstanding young lady, so you are not a virgin because you were previously married and your husband died in a tragic and embarrassing boating incident. I am sorry for your loss. However, this means that you will have more of a say in your second marriage–at least theoretically–than you did in your first marriage. That is because Mohammed said:
A woman who has been previously married (Thayyib) has more right to her person than her guardian
In Islamic law, age is irrelevant to discussions about marriage. There is nothing in the Quran or the ahadith that imposes any sort of age restrictions on any part of the marriage process. The two factors that matter are 1) puberty status and 2) virginity status. Pre-pubescent girls, as I said, are controlled entirely by their male guardians and may be married off without their permission. Pubescent girls who are still virgins have a limited say, though their male guardians do not need their explicit permission to marry them off. Pubescent or post-pubescent girls and women who are not virgins have the most rights out of all; they must clearly agree to the marriage plans. In other words, just staying silent is not enough for your male guardian to continue the marriage process. You still may feel compelled to go through with it–but you have to say you want it.
For the sake of argument, let’s say you do. You’re pretty sure your cousin is the result of an affair anyway and not even your blood relative, and it’s not like you feel any familial attachment to the guy, since you have 80 cousins and never interact with the male ones. The marriage process may now proceed. Your two families will agree to a mahr, or dower, with its exact value and the number of installments in which it is paid being left up to the families. A marriage contract will be drawn up and endorsed by your male guardian and the groom’s party. Then a marriage ceremony (a ceremony meaning, basically, a party, it’s not a religious ceremony per se) will be held, the mahr or at least part of it will be paid to you, and you and your husband will go consummate your marriage. Congratulations! As of now, your husband is entitled to your body at his leisure, and you are prohibited from denying his “lawful” (NO BUTT STUFF) advances. You are forbidden from sexual contact with any other person, though your husband may have sex with up to three other wives and an unlimited number of sex slaves.
Now for the less-happy topic. It’s four years later, and your marriage isn’t going too great. How were you supposed to know he was into weird vore shit? Well, we have three scenarios here (all marriage in Islam is het so don’t @ me asking where the gayz are):
1) The man wants a divorce, but the woman does not.
2) Both spouses agree to divorce.
3) The woman wants a divorce, but the man does not.
If you’re a man, divorcing a wife for any reason is extremely easy, whether she wants a divorce or not. All he has to do, literally, is say that he’s divorcing her. This process is called “talaq” and mentioned in the Quran; judging by the ahadith, it was the most common form of divorce in Mohammed’s era.
The way it’s meant to work is this. A man states his intent to divorce his wife when she doesn’t have her period. He waits three months before the divorce can be finalized to ensure there’s no pregnancy, during which time he is obligated to financially provide for her. At the end of this period, the divorce is finalized. Assuming there is no pregnancy and no outstanding mahr to be paid, that’s all he has to do, and the marriage ends with no further obligations. (If there is an outstanding mahr, it must be paid.)
If he changes his mind and takes her back during the waiting period, this is allowable. And then he can say he’s divorcing her again, change his mind again, and take her back again. (The woman has no say in this btw, if a man wants to take his wife back like this then he can do so.) The third time he does this, the divorce is irrevocable and his obligations to his wife are over immediately. The two spouses can’t reconcile, unless the woman marries another man and divorces him. Then the first husband can inexplicably marry her again. Mohammed…. his mind…!
While that is the “proper” way of doing it, a discouraged but still technically valid way of conducting talaq is for a guy to say that he’s divorcing his wife three times at once, instantly making the divorce permanent. But divorcing a woman and leaving her alone with zero notice and no ability to reconcile with her husband (uh… without marrying another guy first) is obviously ruinous to her. So while this way of doing it does have precedent in early Islam and has a long history of being practiced, it’s still frowned-upon in most of the modern world. You hear about it more in Asia than elsewhere these days.
…Out of curiosity, I just looked up whether “triple talaq”, as the three-times-fast thing is called, is legal under India or Pakistan’s legal systems. Apparently they’re trying to get rid of it in India but Muslim women’s groups are fighting it… because it’s permissible in Islam and therefore must remain legal. Stay self-hating, dumbasses!
Anyway, that’s the Quranic way to obtain a divorce. But talaq can only be used by men. Allah neglected to mention what people should do if the woman is the one who wants a divorce (but he did make sure to mention how much he wanted Mohammed to marry his beautiful daughter-in-law. Priorities!). Fortunately, the ahadith contain another method of divorce that can occur if both the man and the woman agree to it.
This khul process is also fairly simple, and can be accomplished by the woman paying her husband back the mahr (dower) that he gave her when they got married. There is a waiting period, again to ensure there’s no pregnancy, and then the marriage just ends. This is based almost solely on a hadith in which a divorce is conducted by a woman returning the garden her husband had given her as mahr and the husband accepting it. If the man rejects the woman’s attempt to return her mahr, she can try increasing the “payment” until he accepts; alternatively, if the husband wants a fast divorce, he may accept something worth less than the value of the mahr. But some sort of transaction like this must be mutually agreed-upon for the divorce to be valid.
The benefit of this process vs the other one, for a man, is that the man is not obligated to pay any of the remaining mahr, and in fact gets some of it back. Also, most schools of Islamic jurisprudence state that the husband isn’t required to financially provide for the wife during the waiting period unless she is pregnant. That’s because khul is an irrevocable divorce, and a reputable hadith says:
there is no lodging and maintenance allowance for a woman who has been given irrevocable divorce.
…and also the Quran seems to limit financial maintenance in the irrevocable-divorce waiting period to pregnant women in surah 65. Khul became increasingly common in later eras of Islamic history, though many of the cases involving khul probably weren’t truly with the wife’s full consent. After all, why would you want to pay your soon-to-be-ex-wife and provide for her for a few months, when you could get paid by her and not have to provide for her at all?
The third and final option, involving a woman who wants a divorce but a man who does not want a divorce, is much trickier. There are two ways that a Muslim woman may end her marriage even if the husband doesn’t want to under Islamic law.
One must be done in advance of any trouble: if a guy vows to his wife that “I will divorce you if I [whatever]” or “you can leave if I [whatever]”, and it can be proven that this happened, then he is bound to uphold his oath if he does… whatever that thing is, since it is taken as a legally-binding declaration. Typically this happens at the beginning of the marriage. The stipulation must be bound to an oath from the man, it cannot be done retroactively, and women cannot force their husbands to do it. So this does still require the husband’s agreement, just advanced agreement.
If there is no previously agreed-upon “conditional divorce” or it can’t be proven, but the woman still wants a divorce and her husband says no, then an alternate method has to be used. This has no precedent in the Quran or ahadith, and had to be “inferred” by jurists due to a lack of guidance, which was one of several reforms of Islam in the Abbasid era.
Unilateral female divorce is not conducted independently by the couple, unlike the other methods. A woman in this situation cannot initiate a divorce on her own and instead must have her request for a divorce considered by an Islamic judge. Permission to divorce is granted based on several criteria. First, there must be an indisputably valid reason for the divorce. No-fault divorces are not allowed when initiated by women and in fact result in women going to hell:
Any woman who asks her husband for a divorce when it is not absolutely necessary, the fragrance of Paradise will be forbidden to her.
Second, when there is a valid reason for the divorce, the fault of this must be assignable to the man. In other words, if it’s found that the woman wants another dick and that’s why she wants a divorce, it will not be granted to her–the man has to be the one who did something worthy of divorce. Finally, there must be evidence of this fault and the irreparable negative impact of it. The woman saying “he’s mean to me” or whatever won’t suffice. Witnesses and written documents may be consulted. In some cases, an investigation may be carried out. For example, if a woman says that her husband cannot financially provide for her, some schools of jurisprudence recommend investigating to see if the man’s financial situation is temporary and if it will improve after a certain period. If that period elapses and it still hasn’t improved, they judge this valid grounds for divorce.
Different schools of Islamic jurisprudence have different lists of what constitutes a valid, provable fault. The most stringent of them accept only one, namely impotence. If a guy never consummates the marriage or is physically incapable of having sex, then the marriage can be dissolved so that the woman can have kids with another man. (Some schools of jurisprudence only give women a certain period of time, usually a year, to claim this right; otherwise they’re stuck in their sexless marriages.) Other schools of jurisprudence broaden the list and include things like abandonment and destitution. Few go any further than that, and none include simple marital disharmony or incompatibility.
If a woman believes she has a valid reason and evidence of it, it’s time to begin the proceedings. Often the first step is arbitration. In classical Islamic law, this is conducted with male members of both the husband and wife’s families. If you are a woman and find yourself undergoing arbitration in divorce proceedings, you’d better hope that your family’s arbitrators will stick up for you and won’t mind you moving back home for a little while. Otherwise… time to get some plastic surgery, move to Mexico, and start a new life as a waitress named Maria in a seaside resort town.
The judge will usually take the arbitrators’ recommendations into account before pronouncing his verdict, in addition to the evidence necessary to prove the husband’s fault. Judging by historical records, the outcome was basically a crapshoot, since it was all at individual judges’ discretion; in many places it was split 50-50 in terms of the divorce being granted or not. But when the judge rules in the woman’s favor, he pronounces the marriage over, based on the idea that a judge can declare talaq on the husband’s behalf. The divorce may be revocable (which is not ideal for the woman, if you think about it) or irrevocable, depending on the fault.
If the marriage produced young children past a certain age, they are assigned to the father’s custody. The exact age at which this happens varies between the schools of jurisprudence, but on average it’s 7 years old. Some schools have complicated rules for this based on the gender of the kid, in which sons go to their fathers earlier than daughters. Even if the mother is assigned custody, the father still retains his role as the kid’s male guardian; also, women can lose custody of even their very small children if they marry another man (due to the belief that they need to devote themselves to their “new” family) based on this hasan hadith:
A woman said: Messenger of Allah, my womb is a vessel to this son of mine, my breasts, a water-skin for him, and my lap a guard for him, yet his father has divorced me, and wants to take him away from me. The Messenger of Allah (ď·ş) said: You have more right to him as long as you do not marry.
I should add that all these rules vary in Islamic law depending on whether one or both of the spouses are slaves. Predictably, enslaved people, and especially enslaved women, are treated like complete garbage.
…meanwhile, pre-Islamic Bedouin women divorced their husbands by kicking them out of their tents.
Thank god Mohammed invented feminism.
