Report: Sleep ‘divorce’ counts. Reports say Islamic couple must wait 100 days to remarry.
This is a totally unnecessary controversy and the local ‘community leaders’ or whosoever has said it are totally ignorant of Islamic law,” said Zafarul-Islam Khan, an Islamic scholar and editor of The Milli Gazette, a popular Muslim newspaper. “The law clearly says any action under compulsion or in a state of intoxication has no effect. The case of someone uttering something while asleep falls under this category and will have no impact whatsoever,” Khan told Reuters.
Like many of us, I’ve become rather inured to the silliness that is intolerant, Fundamentalist Islam. Perhaps it’s the fear of virtually anything modern. Or the Neanderthal attitude that women are property. Or the willingness to kill, burn, and loot over cartoons. Whatever; just when I think that there couldn’t possibly be anything else that could embarrass Muslims any more, I’m proven wrong- very wrong.
The latest incident involves an Indian Muslim man who somehow managed to divorce his wife while he was fast asleep. Now there’s something even a Fundamentalist Christian couldn’t do….
NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) — A Muslim couple in India have been told by local Islamic leaders they must separate after the husband “divorced” his wife in his sleep, the Press Trust of India reported.
Sohela Ansari told friends that her husband Aftab had uttered the word “talaq,” or divorce, three times in his sleep, according to the report published in newspapers on Monday.
When local Islamic leaders got to hear, they said Aftab’s words constituted a divorce under an Islamic procedure known as “triple talaq.” The couple, married for 11 years with three children, were told they had to split.
The religious leaders ruled that if the couple wanted to remarry they would have to wait at least 100 days. Sohela would also have to spend a night with another man and be divorced by him in turn.
Of course, you’d think the fact that Mr. Ansari was fast asleep and not in control of his faculties while he allegedly divorced his wife would have been a mitigating factor. After all, if you’re asleep, how could you possibly doing something like making and voicing a life-changing decision? Talking in one’s sleep is hardly an unusual phenomenon, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone divorcing their wife while they’re fast asleep. (Damn…I did WHAT???)
All of this is silly enough, but what makes this whole scenario even more farcical is that the local imam and his cohorts have held this to be a legal divorce. No thought was given to the family’s well-being or the circumstances, and the end result is that the family suffers because of a few officious religious authorities more interested in the letter of the law than recognizing the reality of the situation. Man, these folks make our own Religious Right look like paragons or moderation and reason, don’t they?
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