Reopening Muslim Minds by Mustafa Akyol

Author:Mustafa Akyol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Such an abused woman came to Aisha asking for help. The latter told the story to the Prophet, who soon received the revelation: “Divorce is two times; after that, retain her on reasonable terms or release her with kindness.”28 So no man could divorce a wife “a hundred times,” just to “keep her hanging.”29 A terrible practice was ended with a practical solution.

However, a new problem emerged over time: some couples were divorcing three times, but then they were genuinely desiring to reunite. Yet jurists, who upheld the letter of the law, never allowed them to do that. Instead, some tolerated a terrible solution: a short-term marriage with another man, which, according to most jurists, had to include consummation.30 It was called a marriage of tahlil, which made it halal, or “permissible,” for the woman to go back to her original husband.

As one can imagine, this tradition has traumatized many Muslim couples over the centuries and led to an understandably critical literature in modern times.31 Yet it is still alive today, even in Europe. In 2017, BBC journalists exposed a number of online services in the United Kingdom that offer tahlil marriages to triple-divorced Muslim women. The latter had to pay thousands of pounds to “marry, have sex with and then divorce a stranger, so they can get back with their first husbands.”32

Some jurists even exacerbated the problem by ruling that a “triple divorce” can take place in only one instance—when a husband merely says, “I divorce you,” three times. In the recent decades, such “instant triple divorces” have taken place even via email or texting. The practice is most common among the Muslims of India, where a nationwide ban on triple divorce was introduced in 2019. According to Muslim feminist Zakia Soman, the practice had persisted so long because many Muslim men believed it was “approved by the Qur’an.”33 And that is because they totally lacked a contextual understanding of the Qur’an.

What we need to understand is that the immediate addressees of the Qur’an, the first Muslims, and us, Muslims of the twenty-first century, are two very different peoples. So we can’t take all the divine commandments given to the first Muslims, in their very peculiar contexts, as literally applicable in our very different societies.

What we ultimately need is Fazlur Rahman’s method of “double movement”: first going back to the context of the Qur’an in order to understand the divine intentions behind laws, and then coming back to the modern context to formulate new laws to serve those intentions.34 With that perspective, the verses about forbidden months could teach us about chivalry, the verse about “asking permission at three times of day” could educate us about privacy, and the verses that regulate women’s affairs could give us a vision to improve the female condition in any given society.

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