been divorced by him’’ (Sura 2:230).
Rooted in Islam’s liberal teachings on divorce is the
phenomenon of the ‘‘temporary husband.’’ After a husband
has divorced his wife in a fit of anger, these men will
‘‘marry’’ the hapless divorcee for one night in order to
allow her to return to her husband and family.
The apparent harshness of all this seems to be mitigated
by another verse from the Koran: ‘‘If a woman fears ill
treatment or desertion on the part of her husband, it shall be
no offense for them to seek a mutual agreement, for
agreement is best’’ (Sura 4:128). But this call for an
agreement is not a call for a meeting of equals — at least as
it has been interpreted in the Hadith. Muhammad’s wife
Aisha has given an influential analysis of this verse: ‘‘It
concerns the woman whose husband does not want to keep
her with him any longer, but wants to divorce her and marry
some other lady, so she says to him: ‘Keep me and do not
divorce me, and then marry another woman, and you may
neither spend on me, nor sleep with me.’ ’’[53]
The simplicity of divorce in Islam mirrors that of the
Old Testament. In Deuteronomy 24:1–4, Moses teaches that
a man may divorce his wife simply by writing her a ‘‘bill of
divorce’’ and ‘‘dismiss her from his house.’’ (Divorce was,
of course, a oneway street — husbands could divorce their
wives, but wives could not divorce their husbands.) In the
New Testament, though, Jesus puts this teaching in context
by saying God did not intend for divorce to occur, but
Moses permitted it due to ‘‘the hardness of your hearts’’