Divorce, Muslim Style

"Divorce Iranian Style", directed by Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, is an expository documentary about the realities of divorce in Iran. Mir-Hossein and Longinotto were granted permission to film in a divorce court in Tehran; their film in particular shows the difficulties Iranian women face when trying to get a divorce. In her chapter “Rewriting Divorce in Egypt: Reclaiming Islam, Legal Activism, and Coalition Politics”, Singerman explains that in Egypt and in the Middle East in general, men have the unilateral right to divorce while it is much more difficult for women, who have to prove “harm” in some way, whether by desertion, imprisonment, sterility, or mental insanity. A number of cases in the film show women desperately trying to grasp at one of these reasons in order to divorce their husbands. Ziba, a schoolgirl who was married off by her parents at the age of 15, is searching desperately to the claim that her husband is insane and insists that he must be subject to a medical test.

Despite the restrictions women face under sharia, Islamic law, efforts have been made to reform family law, including divorce. Annelies Moors writes about the political change throughout the Muslim world in the 1990s that led to the ability to publicly discuss family law reform. Throughout the Muslim world, including Morocco, Mali, Yemen and Palestine, debates over family law were beginning to take place. Singerman looks specifically at Egypt, which passed the “Law on Recognition of Certain Terms and Procedures of Litigation in Personal Status Matters” in January 2000 and the coalition of “activists, lawyers, government officials, civic leaders, legislators and scholars” that pushed it through the courts (Singerman 162). She believes that without the help of lawyers and legal activists, it could not have passed.

Kecia Ali takes a strong stance on the issue of family law reforms, and I find her fascinating and compelling. She specifically focuses on the history of Islamic jurisprudence and believes that “there is not now, nor has there ever been, a single, unitary Islamic law” (Ali 167). While the Quran talks about dowry, polygamy, and certain paths to divorce, the regulations around marriage largely stem from sharia, which is interpretation. This role of human agency is key because it makes interpretation not divine, and therefore cannot be unilaterally applied.

In the film, the young daughter of the court secretary, Paniz, visits the court every day after school. My favorite part of the film is when she sits up in the judge’s seat and begins acting out an imaginary scene in front of her. She scolds invisible men for not treating their wives correctly and later, says she doesn’t want to marry because of what she has seen in court.

All of these different images of divorce in Islam paint a complicated and tumultuous picture. While some authors focus on the politics of divorce, such as Moors and Singerman, others, like Ali, analyzes the family law code as representative of the larger patriarchal system of marriage in Islam. "Divorce Iranian Style" adds visual images to the debate: the bureaucracy of the courts and the struggles of the women are powerful. Jamileh, whose husband was spending days at a time outside the home, supposedly with another woman, ends her segment by saying “if I respect him, he should respect me.” And Westerners should begin to respect the complexities that lie within Islamic jurisprudence.