Nikah-e-Halala: Ziya Us Salam's Book Shows That Nikah-e-Halala Has No Sanction In Quran Or Hadith
By
Anjana Rajan
Aug 29,
2020
For the
past few years, journalist and author Ziya Us Salam has been releasing books at
a surprisingly rapid pace.
Seen from
the perspective of commercial success, nine titles in some 24 months — not
counting the ones translated into several Indian languages — would definitely
be considered an enviable pace. But then this is no list of potboiler novels.
An Indian Muslim woman looks up while praying during Ramadan at the
shrine of Sufi Muslim saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia. Photo: ABWphoto/Flickr, CC
BY 2.0
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Salam’s
works are not just topical but frequently searing: the rise of fundamentalism
in India; chronicles of the shocking mob lynchings of defenceless citizens in
the name of cow protection and championing of Hindutva; an analytical look at
madrasas today and yesterday; the fraught issue of welcoming women worshippers
into mosques; the scriptural and legal angles of ‘instant triple talaq’; and
the topic of the book under review, nikah Halala, a notorious practice.
Though
written more from a journalistic than a scholarly angle, these books will
likely be studied by historians when they trace India’s transformation as the
20th century lurched uncertainly into the 21st. What was once a diverse and
highly flawed but vociferously vocal democracy, with fierce political debates
common even among the illiterate, is today a country of polarised communities where
disinformation has been sharpened to a degree of weaponisation and fear of
political reprisal is a tangible deterrent to free speech. In this downward
spiral, perhaps no group has been more relentlessly attacked, both
metaphorically and literally, it’s very right to existence questioned, than
India’s Muslim citizens.
Ziya Us Salam
Nikah Halala: Sleeping with a Stranger
Bloomsbury India, 2020
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So, Salam’s
impressive run of new releases, a few of them bestsellers, even as he holds
down a full-time job as a journalist, has no doubt also been an intensely
personal and troubling journey too, an aspect occasionally touched upon in his
writing.
How can
Indian politics today be anything but a deeply personal tumult for any of us,
as our individual choices in clothes, food, entertainment, colours, in ways to
pray and live are hauled up and judged under the ugly glare of a frenzied mob
mentality? But information and knowledge counter the downward spiral, and
Salam’s body of work is an inspiration to the resilient.
Salam has a
journalistic penchant for finding a story that needs telling along with a
reverence for Islam, which he tirelessly strives to explain and decode for an
array of readers – both those belonging to other religions and those of the
Muslim faith. His frank critique of traditions that have crept into the
day-to-day practice of Islam, particularly in India and the rest of the
subcontinent, ensures that the oversensitive sometimes take offence at his
‘raking up’ of unsavoury topics, such as why so many mosques don’t create
facilities for female worshippers, when the faith is already at the receiving
end of so much bad propaganda.
But if this
author is devoted to Islam, he is as devoted to saying what needs to be said,
and perhaps it is his stature as a devout, practising Muslim – I have come to
know this after working with him for close to two decades – that qualifies him
to speak about the subject, with a more persuasive voice than a mere
intellectual scholar or a more pragmatic modernist.
The somewhat
provocative subtitle of Nikah Halala is emblematic of the author’s scathing
view of a practice that he explains has no sanction according to the Quran or
the hadiths but is nevertheless prevalent throughout many parts of the
subcontinent and is a gross distortion of women’s rights in marriage. Through
examples taken from both legal cases and personal interviews of men and women
off the public radar, Salam shows how women are first convinced that they have
been divorced by their husband, and then forced to literally “sleep with a
stranger” to become ‘eligible’ to reunite with the husband who is now repentant
and hopes for a reconciliation.
Say a man
divorces his wife (by saying ‘talaq’ out loud three times), but he regrets his
words in a day or two, and the two decide to reconcile. The couple is
frequently told that the woman can no longer just carry on being his wife, nor
can she even formally marry him again, until and unless she first marries
another man, consummates the marriage and then gets a divorce from the second
husband.
Such a
marriage is arranged for the woman by helpful relatives, sometimes by a
maulana, and often by the frustrated husband himself, in the misguided belief
that this experience will serve as his chastisement for losing his temper. A
temporary groom is found, merely for the sake of going through a sham nikah,
followed by sexual intercourse. Thus, the woman who had become ‘haram’ for her
legally married husband, becomes ‘halal’ for him once she has slept with
another man.
The author,
drawing a parallel to prostitution, describes how money is frequently a part of
this transaction, the groom being generously ‘compensated’ for his services. If
all parties stick to their word, the procedure is over within a few days. But
sometimes the new husband is loath to give up his new bride, leading to further
anguish. The reason many women submit to this abuse of their right over their
own body, with no legal safeguards, notes Salam, is that they may have children
from the first marriage and be desperate to get back together with the father.
Husbands, brought up to believe that a wife is a possession that can be stolen
and retrieved, too may shudder through this grisly turn of events for the sake
of future stability.
Nikah
Halala makes it amply clear through references to verses and interpretations of
scholars that this procedure has no sanction in the Quran and is a distortion
of the Prophet’s intention. In the third chapter, “The Islamic Perspective”,
the author, referring to Surah Baqarah, verse 229, writes, “The Quran says,
‘Divorce can be pronounced twice: then, either honourable retention or kindly
release should follow.’”
Further on
in the same chapter, we learn that these two pronouncements of divorce are to
be separated by at least a month. The wife’s menstrual cycle is taken into
account when prescribing the times when the husband can pronounce divorce,
presumably because, in Islam, a divorce cannot take place while she is
pregnant.
Elsewhere,
the author writes:
“After the
first divorce, if he realises his mistake, and his wife agrees, he can either
annul his divorce through word or action or marry her again with a fresh nikah
after the expiry of the iddah period; no third person’s involvement is needed.
It is the same if he divorces her for the second time. She does not need to
marry anybody else and it can be a direct reunion of the erring couple.”
If the
intention to divorce is repeated a third time however, the divorce becomes
irrevocable. In this case, the couple does not have the option of indulging a
change of heart. The woman officially becomes ‘haram’ for her former husband
and is free to choose another partner. Should she marry again, and should she
by chance become a widow or divorcee, she is once more a woman free to choose a
husband. In such a scenario, the first husband is allowed to be a prospective
suitor too, says the author. In these circumstances, she has become ‘halal’ for
him once more.
It is this
provision regarding the possibility that the woman’s second marriage might end
too, allowing the former husband to be a suitor, that has been grossly
misinterpreted to force women into nikah Halala in so many instances in India.
Instead of being considered an incidental circumstance that may — or indeed may
not — lead to a woman remarrying her former husband, nikah Halala gets turned
into a precondition for a marriage to the first husband!
Knitted in
with the sham marriage is the sham divorce. Once it is clear that a couple may
get divorced twice and revoke it twice, but the third divorce is irrevocable,
there seems no scope to accept that “talaq” pronounced thrice in the same
sitting also signifies an irrevocable divorce. However, this is regularly
happening due to ignorance. And is followed up by the equally erroneous and unfair
demand for nikah Halala. The author states on page 40, “In fact, the misuse and
distortion of the Halala practice in the Indian subcontinent stems from the
practice of instant triple talaq. Halala takes place after an instant triple
talaq and ends with an instant triple talaq.”
Even after
the Supreme Court ruled instant triple talaq as unconstitutional, and the
government followed up with the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage)
Act of 2019 with provisions for a jail sentence for men divorcing their wives
in this way, the practice has not ended. This is simply because legislation
often has little effect on entrenched traditions — as in the case of dowry, as
the author points out. What is needed is social awareness and genuine
empowerment of women so that they cannot be cheated of their rights as wives
and are able to avoid being coerced into a sham marriage for the sake of
Halala.
Salam’s
easy prose is quick to carve into the hypocrisy of a situation where
under-educated maulanas serve as interpreters of the scriptures for a gullible,
even less informed public.
“Understandably,
when such clerics get down to interpreting the religious texts for the masses,
the message is clear and always the same: the masses are teetering on the brink
of hell! And when they are through with their fearmongering, they interpret the
Quran to suit the convenience of men,” he writes with characteristic candour.
It is easy to recall he spent the early part of his career as a features
journalist and cinema critic and headed the North India features editions of
The Hindu for sixteen years.
The book is
full of eye-openers. Some denial in the community notwithstanding, nikah Halala
is sadly prevalent around much of rural Bharat, if not so much urban India, as
the author points out. He also introduces us to perspectives in Pakistan, the
US, UK and countries of West Asia. Although there is some amount of repetition
that actually confuses instead of enlightening the reader, it is a useful text.
Like
Salam’s book on divorce, Till Talaq Do Us Part: Understanding Talaq, Triple
Talaq and Khula (Penguin Random House), Nikah Halala too can help dispel many a
fallacy regarding Islamic injunctions relating to marriage, divorce and women’s
rights. Its accessible prose can also serve to empower potential victims of
misinformation.
The
conclusion ends on a note of caution, reiterating that reform is essentially a
social phenomenon. Expressing faith that the apex court, like the other courts
when handling matters of divorce and inheritance in Islam, followed “the letter
and spirit of the Quran and hadiths”, he conjures a possible scenario that
could be overlooked: What if a woman genuinely wants to remarry her first
husband after her second husband has either divorced her or died?
“If she is
not allowed to marry her first husband again, would it not be an infringement
of the Muslim community’s fundamental rights, as protected by the same
constitution?”
The
question is a reminder that there are no easy solutions.
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Anjana Rajan has been writing on the arts,
literature and society for nearly twenty years. She is a former deputy editor
of The Hindu, a dance exponent and theatre practitioner.
Original
Headline: 'Nikah Halala' Review: A Scathing Indictment of a Practice That Has
No Quranic Sanction
Source: The Wire