I first heard of triple talaq last summer. My interpreter and I had just caught a rickshaw on the edge of a majority Muslim slum in Pune, India. We were discussing the interview we had just conducted with a Muslim woman who ran a tiffin, or lunchbox, business from inside her home in the slum. My interpreter, a 30-year-old Hindu (Brahmin) man, started making comments about Muslims in general. “Did you see the way her husband kept interrupting her? That’s so typical of Muslim men.” And, “Muslims don’t treat their women right.” And, finally, with energy: “Did you know a Muslim man only has to say the word talaq three times in a row to divorce his wife? It’s called triple talaq. But now that’s changing in India; men can’t do that anymore.” I had no context to understand what he had just said and did not think much of it until a few weeks later, right before I left the country, when he brought up triple talaq again. “You remember that triple talaq that I told you about? The government just made it illegal!”
I now know that triple talaq was ruled unconstitutional in 2017 by the Supreme Court of India but not made illegal until the controversial passage of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill of 2019 in July (more information can be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/india-triple-talaq/595414/). I am a feminist who supports full equality of men and women. Yet there is a part of me that questions the virtue of this bill. Shortly after its passage, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Parliament revoked the special status of Muslim-majority state Jammu and Kashmir, and has since passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which excludes Muslim asylum-seekers from certain asylum rights guaranteed to people belonging to many other major religions (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/13/indias-new-law-may-leave-millions-muslims-without-citizenship/). With these major changes, driven by Hindu nationalism, in mind, I wonder whether the triple talaq bill was meant to protect Muslim women, or politically motivated, or both. Probably both.
I gained a lot more context about triple talaq, and talaq in general, from Kecia Ali’s "Lesser Evils: Divorce in Islamic Ethics"—but I am still not sure how I feel about the triple talaq bill. Certainly, not all Muslims observe triple talaq, and Ali notes multiple times that those who do observe it look down upon it while still recognizing its validity (26). Given that Islamic tradition, no matter the school of thought being considered (and some, like the Maliki school, are much more lenient than others, like the Hanafi), does not give women the same rights to divorce as men, penalizing men for taking advantage of a tradition that severely limits women’s rights must be a victory for women, and a step towards recognizing their equality in marriage (27). But as Ali notes, progress of legal reforms, such as India’s triple talaq bill, “has been hampered by continual struggles over ‘authenticity’ and the self-aggrandizing tendencies of the modern nation-state to work to bring everything under its control” (29). How do we weigh religious tradition alongside women’s rights? Ali offers several possible answers to this question, but she concludes the chapter vaguely, calling for a “reform in the basic structure of Muslim marriage itself” (36). Can a country controlled by a non-Muslim majority government objectively outlaw a Muslim practice? Does the triple talaq bill have to be motivated only by the advancement of women—can it be supported by both women’s rights advocates and Hindu nationalists, but for different reasons? I am interested in discussing more in class the differences between legal and religious law, and how we can interpret these differences in practice today.
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