An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 71: How A Husband Can Divorce His Wife. But Not How a Wife can Divorce Her Husband. Funny That (Divorce(al-Talaq))

Divorce(al-Talaq)
How A Husband Can Divorce His Wife. But Not How a Wife can Divorce Her Husband. Funny That.

Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Qur’an version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Qur’an, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/2ApLDy0
For the online Qur’an that I use, see here http://al-quran.info and http://quran.com

Divorce(al-Talaq) 1-12
“When you divorce women, divorce them at [the conclusion of] their term and calculate the term,”

This chapter is mainly about rules for divorce, being one of those rare chapters where the title has much relevance to the subject. And as you might expect, the rules are for a man on how to divorce a woman, with nothing the other way around.

The “term” mentioned in the quote above has been given to us before in some earlier chapters – generally it is three months, based on a menstrual cycle, but this chapter expands on this a bit later on, telling us that its three months also for menopausal women - “As for those of your wives who do not hope to have menses, should you have any doubts, their term shall be three months” and also “for those [as well] who have not yet had menses”, which has the rather disturbing implication of pre-pubescent brides. I’m sure there are apologists that will say that it means no such thing and is just in case a woman has reached the age of eighteen and yet somehow not yet started menstruation. But, it doesn’t say that.

Pregnant women are to be kept on until the child is born, and can also be paid as a wet-nurse if they want. In this case, as with all the other women who must wait three months, the man is to put them up in his own house, according to his ability to pay - “Let the affluent man spend out of his affluence, and let he whose provision has been tightened spend out of what Allah has given him”. He’s not to 
“harass them to put them in straits” and can only turf them out if the commit “a gross indecency” (some translations have “proven indecency”). And what counts as an “indecency”? This chapter doesn’t say, but according to the commentary it has been interpreted to mean “adultery, lesbianism, theft of revilement of the husband and his family”.

The last few verses rather incongruously jump to warnings about what happened to communities that ignored previous prophets, and then the usual platitudes about how wonderful Allah is. And as for the husband, he should not break his side of the deal but “You never know maybe Allah will bring off something new later on”, which is a really oddly modern phraseology for the translation.

And … that’s it. Not only are the rules somewhat confusingly written, not to mention you need at least two chapters to interpret them fully, they are also just a teeny tiny bit massively unbalanced as far as the sexes go. The divorce … I want to say “laws” but they barely count as that. Guidelines? Anyway, as far as the guidelines for divorce go, they’re still less confusing than those baroque inheritance laws from earlier.

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