Dear ladies, read about Nikah-halala

Submitted by Prashant, Feb 6, 2019 at 20:12

Dear Dr Pipes,

The following message is relevant in the context of non-Muslim women marrying Muslim man. Rather than using logic and common sense, Islamic societies often try to literally apply sharia, Quran or Hadiths. This tendency leads to many bad or evil practices to persist. I just learned about Nikah-halala an almost evil practice sometimes practiced by Muslims of Indian subcontinent. In Islam, a man can divorce his wife by saying the word 'divorce' three times. This practice is cruel but its corollaries are even more so. You see, divorce and marriage here are not a matters of love and heart. They are matters of some bizarre rules. A divorce in Islam is pretty binding and the divorced couple cannot remarry if they change their minds until the woman marries and sleeps with another man and divorces the new husband. This law sounds absurd and should never be practiced but the story does not end there. In certain sections of the Indian Islamic society it takes an uglier turn. What if the first husband and second husband become business partners? I do not even want to describe the possibilities here. The readers should do their own research.

As much as the entire practice is ugly, what leads to these ugly practices is even uglier. People are not using their heads here. Their position is that if two things are each permissible by literal interpretation of quran, then their combination should also be legal. This shortage of commonsense is the primary cause of problem.

So why does India tolerate this kind of non-sense? India is a democracy with Hindu majority. But it allows Muslims to use Sharia in the matters of family and marriage.. The Islamist lobby is so strong in India that secular government cannot interfere much in the Islamic law. Believe it or not this episode came into public knowledge in India when a Muslim woman asked the court to grant her alimony because her husband was repeatedly marrying and divorcing her. The rest is not fit to print. People should do their own research..

There have been efforts to make Sharia legal in the US and UK. Everyone should know what that can bring to the society.

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