Instant verbal divorce rips families apart in Iran's Kurdish region
An uncommon Sunni practice granting immediate verbal divorce has wreaked havoc on the lives of many Kurdish-Iranian families, and some legal and religious parties argue it should be abolished.
Rozhan thought that she was in a happy and loving marriage — until her husband divorced her through an archaic Islamic practice that she was scarcely aware of.
Rozhan, 30, lived with her husband, Shaho, 41, and their two small children in Mariwan, a border town in the Kurdish region in western Iran. Last spring, Rozhan told her husband that she was going to visit her sister who lived just a few streets away. Shaho objected, saying casually, “I triple talaq [divorce] you if you go.”
“So I declared that I divorced her three times, not fully aware that this was irreversible,” said Shaho, who told his story to Al-Monitor on condition his full name not be used.
Triple talaq, or talaq al bid’ah, is a form of divorce under Islam that enables a man to verbally end his marriage. Different Islamic traditions have different practices around this instant and irrevocable form of verbal divorce, and some scholars consider it irreconcilable with the Islamic idea of marriage. In the Kurdish region of Iran, however, it is invoked often. Once it is declared, the couple is expected to cease to live together immediately. Otherwise, they are committing “zina,” an illegitimate relationship between a man and a woman who are not married. When Shaho’s father, a conservative Shafi’i cleric, heard the story through his son, he ordered them to stop living together.
