a Muslim woman would be entitled to seek divorce if her husband was found having illicit relationship with another woman.Fine, good news. But I can’t seem to see the sunshine for the black cloud: the realization that India’s women are governed, in their family relations, by the law of the religious community they happen to belong to. Not so long ago, I was shocked to learn that in Israel, the “democracy of the Middle East” family law is handled by Orthodox rabbis.
The board has also rejected any divorce done through SMS, e-mail, phone as video conferencing, besides rejecting divorce done on provocation.
A Muslim woman can seek divorce if she is forced by her husband to indulge in unnatural sex. She can also seek divorce if her husband contracts AIDS.
How many other countries do the same, treating family as sectarian religious matters rather than as a matter of human rights? This isn't an issue only for Third World countries. Remember when the Archbishop of Canterbury created controversy by suggesting Britain would likely soon have to allow Muslims in Britain to be governed by sharia? And right-wingers want to introduce “covenant marriage” in this country—they’ve succeeded in a couple of states.
Some commentators on the archbishop’s remarks suggested this would be just fine because people would have to choose to be governed by sharia, much as people in the few states in the U.S. with covenant marriage have to choose to enter it (very few have). In neither India nor Israel do you have any choice. But in any case, if you live within a religious community, how meaningful is such “choice”? You might make the same argument for the legalization of slave contracts; in fact, our society has come to recognize that some “choices” are abhorrent and cannot be enforced or even allowed by the state. It wasn't so long ago that in this country a man beating up his wife was treated as a private matter, a "domestic dispute." Let's not forget what the stakes are when we privatize family law.
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