Islamic text message divorces

Washington Post:

The Cairo woman stared in disbelief at the text message in her cellphone inbox.

She and her husband, an Egyptian army officer away on duty, had just hung up after quarreling on the phone. She ignored his return call, not wanting to continue the argument, the woman recounted in an interview this week.

The electronic chirrup of an incoming message signaled his response. "I divorce you," her husband had written. "That will teach you not to answer my calls."

Reconciliation followed, only to be broken by another quarrel, this one over the woman asking her family to mediate the couple's problems. "I divorce you," her husband wrote in another message. "Don't ask other people to interfere in our business."

Another reconciliation. Another argument. And another declaration of divorce from her husband, this time face to face, late last year.

Islamic law can make the act of divorce stunningly simple for men, even if the ensuing financial settlements often are not. A husband has only to declare to his wife, "Inti talaq" -- "You are divorced" -- three times, and mean it, to end their marriage.

But technology has introduced a complication that Egyptian religious authorities are now debating in the case of the 25-year-old Cairene, an engineer and an observant Muslim: How should Islamic laws that began to take shape in the 6th century apply to 21st-century text messages?

In Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, where some of the first text-message divorce cases have arisen in recent years, civil and religious officials have arrived at varying conclusions.

Until Egyptian courts and religious scholars decide the fate of the woman's marriage, she lives apart from the officer with their 4-year-old son, but still wears her wedding ring. She asked that her name not be used to protect her privacy, because such cases are so rare in Egypt.

"What hurts me most is I don't even know if I'm divorced or not," she said in an interview. The woman, slim and soft-spoken, wore a lavender head scarf to cover her hair and matching lavender shadow drawn carefully around her eyes.

...

Religious authorities in at least two Persian Gulf countries, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, upheld divorce by text message in rulings between 2001 and 2003. Islamic officials in Singapore rejected it.

Government officials in Malaysia decried the first cases, promising big fines for any man who tried to shed his wife by impersonal text messages.

"We hope . . . that instead of sending messages, you should look at the beautiful wife that you are going to divorce," then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said in 2003. "Maybe she would cry a bit, and you would change your mind."

Malaysia's religious leaders upheld the legality of text-message divorce, and government talk of bans and fines ended.

In Egypt, text messages strike many as far too frivolous a way to end a marriage.

"It has to be face to face, person to person," said Sanaa Mohammed, a 43-year-old woman standing outside a Cairo family court this week. She jabbed two fingers toward her eyes, symbolizing eye-to-eye contact. By cellphone, "it's not respectful."

...

There have been reports in the west of some using text messages to break dates and break up, but it is clear that you cannot divorce in Texas by merely sending a text message or three. But the case of the Egyptian woman seems silly at its heart. If the guy is determined to divorce her, he can show up and tell her to her face and make the question go away.

In some ways the text message can make for a more permanent record of the statement than an oral statement between the two of them, The story does not indicate whether a letter which would be a permanent record of the statement of intent would satisfy the requirement. The article does not discuss whether women have the same rights when it comes to divorce.

It seems pretty clear the Cairo woman and her "husband" don't like each other anymore.