Divorce, What’s Islam’s take?

Divorce is the official end of a marriage. That’s the simplest definition really! No, I haven’t checked a dictionary, I just wrote it off the top of my head.

I don’t know about other religions, I am not even properly educated enough to talk about or represent my own religion. Therefore I have done some online browsing for the proper rules of divorce as per Islam.

It says here that proper justifications for a divorce could be sterility of either the husband or the wife, either one of them is terminally ill which is negatively affecting his spouse’s life to an unbearable extreme, or the husband could simply be abusive and impossible to live with.

Nonetheless, the drawbacks of divorce cannot be ignored since it has a negative impact on the husband financially, it may cause the wife to suffer both emotionally and financially and could leave her an easy victim to sin, and finally its effect on the children is dramatic! Therefore, it should be limited to cases where the marriage reaches a dead-end.

It was basically a good an informative read despite how confusing it sort of got when it came to how accepted/frowned upon divorce is in Islam; however, I guess it is basically because each and every case has its own context.

My browsing then took me there where the fatwa says that a woman is completely entitled to getting a divorce from an abusive husband.

I couldn’t help but stop there because I was too curious to know what the sheikh would say to a woman who has no affection whatsoever towards her husband, actually resents him is more of the word, yet chooses to stay in the marriage for the sake of the kids. I am ashamed to say that I was rather disappointed to read that the fatwa implied that she should be more patient and try to find ways to love her husband and continue living with him, when it was mentioned right here that:

“The wife of Thabit ibn Qais ibn Shammas came to the Prophet and said, "O Allah's Messenger! I do not blame Thabit for any defects in his character or his religion, but I am afraid that I (being a Muslim) may become unthankful for Allah's blessings." On that, Allah's Messenger said (to her), "Will you return his garden to him?" She said, "Yes." So she returned his garden to him and the Prophet told him to divorce her. (Al-Bukhari 7:63, no. 199)”

It’s fair to say that all these iformation has left me too confused to sleep properly until I had awaken up the next day to stumble into a rerun of a talk show about the same topic from both the religious and the legal points of view!!

But that’s for my next post...