Iraq as a Failed State - Planning for Partition

[Shek]

I pulled this report, Iraq as a Failed State . . . Where Do We Go From Here from The Fund for Peace yesterday. It argues that we would do best to plan on partitioning Iraq now so that such a plan could achieve a "soft" landing instead of a de facto partition down the road.

I haven't had a chance to read through the full report, but I'm curious to see what others think of their assumptions and framework for analyzing the issue.

[S2]

Managed Partition as per an E.U. Model

Based on admittedly subjective analysis as reliant upon the prevailing news-media as objective measurements, these guys advocate a "managed partition", ala the partition of India/Pakistan in terms of population movements and rights accorded while suggesting some E.U. form of economic planning/interdependance but retaining sovereignty on foreign policy/state security matters.

My assessment. How niiiice...but I don't see this being implemented. I can't imagine a climate of trust even adequate to conduct the planning and, more, implementation of such an ordered transition.

That's my short version, anyway.

[Ray]

Shek and S- 2,

Have a look at this:

The Indypendent : Bush’s Iraq Strategy for 2007: A Second Civil War or Genocide

Comments, please.

How far is this article on facts?

[cato]

15 RULES FOR UNDERSTANDING THE MIDDLE EAST
BYLINE: By THOMAS FRIEDMAN
SECTION: MAIN; Pg. A15
LENGTH: 763 words

For a long time, I let my hopes for a decent outcome in Iraq triumph over what I had learned reporting from Lebanon during its civil war. Those hopes vanished last summer. So, I’d like to offer President Bush my updated rules of Middle East reporting, which also apply to diplomacy, in hopes they’ll help him figure out what to do next in Iraq.

Rule 1: What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language. Anything said to you in English, in private, doesn’t count. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth off the record. In the Mideast, officials say what they really believe in public and tell you what you want to hear in private.
Rule 2: Any reporter or U.S. Army officer wanting to serve in Iraq should have to take a test, consisting of one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer yes, you can’t go to Iraq. You can serve in Japan, Korea or Germany - not Iraq.
Rule 3: If you can’t explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don’t try to explain it at all - they won’t believe it.
Rule 4: In the Middle East, never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person doing the conceding. If I had a dollar for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasser Arafat, I could paper my walls.
Rule 5: Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over before the next morning’s paper.
Rule 6: In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away.
Rule 7: The most oft-used expression by moderate Arab pols is: “We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it’s too late. It’s all your fault for being so stupid.”
Rule 8: Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas - like liberalism vs. communism. They are about which tribe gets to rule. So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war as we once did. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It’s the South vs. the South.
Rule 9: In Middle East tribal politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, “I’m weak, how can I compromise?” And when it’s strong, it will tell you, “I’m strong, why should I compromise?”
Rule 10: Mideast civil wars end in one of three ways: a) like the U.S. civil war, with one side vanquishing the other; b) like the Cyprus civil war, with a hard partition and a wall dividing the parties; or c) like the Lebanon civil war, with a soft partition under an iron fist (Syria) that keeps everyone in line. Saddam used to be the iron fist in Iraq. Now it is us. If we don’t want to play that role, Iraq’s civil war will end with A or B.
Rule 11: The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel’s mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can’t understand how, if they have the superior religion, Israel can be so powerful. Al Jazeera’s editor, Ahmed Sheikh, said it best when he recently told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche: “It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every
Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.”
Rule 12: Thus, the Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.
Rule 13: Our first priority is democracy, but the Arabs’ first priority is “justice.” The oft-warring Arab tribes are all wounded souls, who really have been hurt by colonial powers, by Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, by Arab kings and dictators, and, most of all, by each other in endless tribal wars. For Iraq’s long-abused Shiite majority, democracy is first and foremost a vehicle to get justice. Ditto the Kurds. For the minority Sunnis, democracy in Iraq is a vehicle of injustice. For us, democracy is all about protecting minority rights. For them, democracy is first about consolidating majority rights and getting justice.
Rule 14: The Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi had it right: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”
Rule 15: Whether it is Arab-Israeli peace or democracy in Iraq, you can’t want it more than they do.

Shek, S-2, Ray,
Tom Friedman pretty much sums it up. The FFPs idea about a "soft landing", violates Rules 9 & 10 of the Friedman Codex. As S-2 stated, the prerequisite conditions of trust, or at least mutual exhaustion to suppress antipathy are simply non-existant (from my perch 13,000 miles away, at least). I cannot think, of the top of my head, of a partition occuring under fire that brought cecession of conflict. What with population transfers, and oodles of bad memories, the fight continues ad-infinitum, (Israel-Palestine, Indo-Pak). I suppose that the Country Formerly Known As Yugoslavia, may qualify as successful, but if memory serves, it is still being babysat by the EU, with a small American contingent. Not exactly the same parameters found in Mesopotamia tooday.

That brings me to Ray's article. The 80% Solution (or a softer, somewhat nicer version thereof) seems to already be the vehicle of choice. I may definitely be wrong, but the arming, and training of the Shiite dominated security forces, combined with the refusal to disarm the Pesh (rightfully so IMHO) means the Sunni Arabs will be left (or rather left themselves, depending on personal views) out in the proverbial cold. So be it. I'm all for a united Arab Iraq(istan). It will most certainly fall into Persia's orbit, but hey! No more AQ in the Land of the Two Rivers. I would be most interested to hear from some South Asian posters regarding their opinions about the effacacy of partition, and the paralells (if any, it is certainly an area of shameful ignorance for me) between their own countries' experiences and the situation in Iraq.
Thanks Much
Cato

[Ray]

I am South Asian and an Indian.

Partition has made no difference to India, where the population continues to have the same religious mix as before and secular laws are in place. Sharia, however, operates through the backdoor for the faithful!

Pakistan is 98% Moslem and Islamic Laws rule all, irrespective of religion.

In so far as Partition bringing peace, the facts are on the ground and history is too recent to recount.

Iraq, too, will burn!

[sparten]

I am South Asian and an Indian.

Partition has made no difference to India, where the population continues to have the same religious mix as before and secular laws are in place. Sharia, however, operates through the backdoor for the faithful!

Pakistan is 98% Moslem and Islamic Laws rule all, irrespective of religion.

In so far as Partition bringing peace, the facts are on the ground and history is too recent to recount.

Iraq, too, will burn!

Wrong as usual.

As for the main thing, I don't think breaking Iraq up is the best solution. You have a Kurdish state which the Turks would invade first chance they get, and a Shia state contigious to Iran, giving Iran acess to Syria.

Anyways Tommy up there should have remembered to add the most important rule, "The Mid-East remembers history".

So American power is pretty unfazing to them, they will point out, we saw babylon, Persia, Alexander, Rome, the Mongols. Taimur, the Ottomons and the Brits. They all went and so will you.

Of course if the US is smart they will attempt to use the most important history lesson to their advantage. Nobody in the Mid-East really wanst Persia (aka Iran) paramount again. As it is memories of the Achaemenids , the Sassanians, Ilk-Khanate and the Safavids are pretty fresh.

But to paraphrase De Guall the US will only come to that conclusion after having reached every other one and having it disproved.

[cato]

Ray,
Thanks for your response! At the risk of hijacking the thread, could you, or any other Indian, give this Ugly American a brief exposition on Sharia being "the backdoor for the faithful"? I was under the impression that one of the triumphs of Indian independance was the use, and expansion of the common law system bequeathed by the former colonialists. Can it be that Islam, as an independant confessional group has law unto itself? How does the state exert primacy over religeous law, or does it?

Sir, I can well see that Partition hasn't dramatically affected the overall demography of your country, the way it has you neighbor. Again, the huge number of peoples, faiths, and languages that form a functioning democratic state is a major success in and of itself. I suppose that I was getting to the idea that Partition created a hereditary enemy in both nations. In the Iraqi case, the rump Sunni and Shiite states would fight ad infinitum. There would be the continuing zero-sum blood letting between sects, plus the Sunni statelet would be bereft of both hydrocarbons and water. It seems to this armchair quarterback that partitioning Iraq would condemn Arab Iraqistan to generations of warfare, certainly not the desired outcome of the piece offered by the good Major. It is certainly callous, and most definitely easy to say from the safety of my living room, but we ought to choose the winning side. It ain't the Sunni Arabs, for sure. And I would put Iraq burning into present tense, though the fire may well burn hotter in the future.
Thanks,
Cato

[cato]

Hey Sparten!
Glad to make your (virtual)aquaintance, compadre! I would say on the surface that your take on the historical animosity betwixt Persian and Arab which of course far pre dates both Islam and the Faith's subsequent confessional split, is absolutely correct. I live in Los Angeles, and my area has a surplus of both Arabs and Persians. To this day the two have no fond feelings for each other, and both are far from the impoverished, radicalized populations found in the ME.

"Of course if the US is smart they will attempt to use the most important history lesson to their advantage. Nobody in the Mid-East really wanst Persia (aka Iran) paramount again. As it is memories of the Achaemenids , the Sassanians, Ilk-Khanate and the Safavids are pretty fresh."

I would have to take issue with this, and perhaps you could give your opinion. While America's "allies" in the region, the Sunni despotates howl over the coming of the Shiite Crescent, their radicalized, disinfranchised populaces seem to have another view. I harken back to pro-Hezbollah demonstrations held throuought the ME, and the massive popularity of Hassan Nassrallah by the most conservative Salafist-oriented pouplaces (lockets of Nasrallah being worn by Jordanian Bedou and Saudis). What is Nasrallah if not Persia's schill?
Can hitory be buiried in the face of such fear and loathing of the West? Wouldn't be the first time in the world that odd bedfellows have been created.
Thanks,
Cato

[Ray]

Sparten,

Back?

Gassing as usual! ;)

[Ray]

Cato,

Here is the backdoor issue:

From another thread:

Unfortunately, India and its democratic institution cannot influence any Islamic nation since it has not been able to influence the Indian Moslems themselves!

Most Moslems of India do feel 'cheated' by history that they are not the rulers of India any more and this mindset has not left them. They do forget the history of India that it was not an Islamic nation and that it was with the invasion of the Islamic hordes that India felt the impact of Islam. Initially, the came a brigands to pillage and plunder and convert, but later on with the coming of the Mogals i.e. Babar did they take up residence and perpetuate the Islamic rule in India.

Would a Muslim like to associate with that period of his country's history which is alien to his cultural identity?

The answer may not always be "YES". This ambivalence on their part arises from the fact that there exists in India, a large majority of people who have maintained an unbroken link with the country's past, through the medium of the Hindu religion. But what would have been the attitude of the people of India, had all of them been converted to Islam?

The country's pre-Islamic history, would still have been there. And the people of India, whatever be their religion, would have had to be proud, of the achievements of their forefathers who nevertheless had conformed to a different religion. Had they not been proud of these achievements, there would have been no one else to turn to. History would have been a void. Maybe that would also be an option.

(In this context, since you speak of Malaysia, their ancestors were Hindus. However, that part of Malaysian history is void!!! A visit to their Museum in Penang would indicate that their history as recorded starts with the Islamic phase. They have wiped away their original antecedents!)

But today this is not so and those Indians who have embraced Islam normally look upon with scorn on the country's ancient heritage before their religion came into the picture. The reason being that there is a large majority of Indians who due to their non-conversion (including non Moslems), look upon the whole of India's history and heritage as their own. The past of India is a common heritage of all Indians though it is unfortunate that it is not given its due by those of Islam. Thus, there is a conflict of thought.

Islam in India remains an island by itself. That is not so with Christians, Sikhs or Buddhists or any other religion of India. Though there is the common civil and criminal laws, the Moslems use their Sharia alongside. This leads to conflicts in the Courts of Law!

Islam uses the Moslem vote as a block to act as a 'lever' to blackmail the govt of the day and in elections, the fate of political parties depend on the swing the Moslem votes can have. Hence, the Indian politics is a morass of coercion and blackmail! This is called the "Vote Bank" politics in India.

Therefore, when India and its democratic institutions cannot influence its own Moslem population, India being able to influence others is a far cry!


Also see this case of where the Constitution was changed to accommodate Moslems and appease the Moslem Vote Bank!


The Shah Bano case is infamous in India and has generated political controversy in the country; it is sometimes described as an example of appeasement of the vote bank for political gains.

Brief of the Case

Shah Bano, a 62 year old Muslim woman and mother of five from Indore, Madhya Pradesh, was divorced by her husband in 1978. The Muslim family law (marriage, gifts, inheritance, adoption and a few other civil laws are under the purview of personal laws in India - they are different for Christians, Muslims and Hindus) allows the husband to do this without his wife's consent: the husband just needs to say the word Talaaq before witnesses for a valid divorce. There are different classifications on Talaaq. There are also different aspects as well as other norms of Talaq which differ from sect to sect in Islam. Some sects also have certain prerequisities for a Talaq to be valid. They believe that during the Talaq, the woman should have purified herself from menstruation and her husband should not have had any sexual relationship with her.

Shah Bano, because she had no means to support herself and her children, approached the courts for securing maintenance from her husband. When the case reached the Supreme Court of India, seven years had elapsed. The Supreme Court invoked Section 125 of Code of Criminal Procedure, which applies to everyone regardless of caste, creed, or religion. It ruled that Shah Bano be given maintenance money, similar to alimony.

The orthodox Muslims in India felt threatened by what they perceived as an encroachment of the Muslim Personal Law, and protested loudly at the judgement. Their spokesmen were Muslim community leaders MJ Akbar and Syed Shahabuddin, They formed an organization known as the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and threatened to agitate in large numbers in all major cities. The then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, agreed to their demands and cited the gesture as an example of "secularism".

The Indian Government's Reaction

In 1986, the Congress (I) party, which had an absolute majority in Parliament at the time, passed an act that nullified the Supreme Court's judgment in the Shah Bano case. The Constitution was changed because the Congress Party had an absolute majority in the Parliament. This act upheld the Muslim Personal Law and writ as excerpted below:

"Every application by a divorced woman under section 125… of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, pending before a magistrate on the commencement of this Act shall, notwithstanding anything contained in that code… be disposed of by such magistrate an accordance with the provisions of this Act."

The Government with its absolute majority passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 to dilute the secular judgment of the Supreme Court. The Statement of Objects and Reasons of this Act (i.e. the objective of the Act) needs a mention. According to the stated objects of the Act, where a Muslim divorced woman is unable to maintain herself after the period of iddat, the Magistrate is empowered to make an order for the payment of maintenance by her relatives who would be entitled to inherit her property on her death according to Muslim Law...But where a divorced woman has no relatives or such relatives..has not enough means to pay the maintenance the magistrate would order the State Waqf Board to pay the maintenance. The 'liability' of husband to pay the maintenance was thus restricted to the period of the iddat only. 'Read about 'The iddat of divorce'

Critics strongly contend that this Act was passed in order to appease minorities and safeguard the Muslim vote bank.

Consequences

The Shah Bano case generated tremendous heat in India. It proved that fundamentalist minorities can exert pressure on government and judicial decisions. The mainstream media disapproved of the decision. The opposition reacted strongly against the Congress party's policies (which, according to BJP, reflect "Pseudo-secularism".)

The case has led to Muslim women receiving a large, one-time payment from their husbands during the period of iddat, instead of a maximum monthly payment of 500 Rs (around 10 US Dollar per month) - an upper limit which has since been removed. Cases of women getting lump sum payments for lifetime maintenance are becoming common.

Critics of the Shah Bano case point out that while divorce is within the purview of personal laws, maintenance is not, and thus it is discriminatory to exclude Muslim women from a civil law. Exclusion of non-Muslim men from a law that appears inherently beneficial to men is also pointed out by the Indian orthodoxy.

The Shah Bano case once again spurred the debate on the Uniform Civil Code in India. Ironically, the Hindu Right led by parties like the Jan Sangh which had strongly opposed reform of Hindu law in the 50's, in its metamorphosis as the Bharatiya Janata Party became an advocate for secular laws across the board. The sabre-rattling by Islamic fundmentalists caused women's organisations and secularists to cave in.

It has been argued that even today, India is ruled by such communal laws which divide the society on the basis of Religion, Caste, etc. The usual example quoted for this is reservations in esteemed educational institutions like IIT's, IIM, AIIMS, etc. for backward classes, in spite of them being part of instituitions in most major nations to safeguard the interest of repressed population.

Personal Laws

The existence of personal laws is, in itself, an indicator of a constitutional bias towards maintaining religious harmony. They have been part of the Civil Law since the British Raj. The importance of personal laws lies in the fact that India is a secular nation with a sizeable concentration of several different religious groups. However, personal laws have been criticized by Feminists for their orthodox approach and for disadvantaging women. Religious rights and women's rights remain at conflict due to the disparities in religious laws. The likelihood that a common civil code for India may be introduced in the future seems bleak as even a discussion of the topic evokes strong reactions.

Judicial craftsmanship has ensured that The Muslim Women's [Protection of Rights on Divorce] Act hasn't completely violated the rights of women. High Courts have interpreted "just and fair provision" that a woman is entitled to during her iddat period very broadlly to include amounts worth lakhs (hundred thousand) of rupees. More recently the Supreme Court in Danial Latifi v. Union of India read the Act with Art 14 and 15 of the constitution which prevent discrimination of the basis of sex and held that the intention of the framers could not have been to deprive Muslim women of their rights. Further the Supreme Court construed the statutory provision in such a manner that it does not fall foul of Articles 14 and 15. The provision in question is Section 3(1)(a) of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 which states that "a reasonable and fair provision and maintenance to be made and paid to her within the iddat period by her former husband;". The Court held this provision means that reasonable and fair provision and maintenance is not limited for the iddat period (as evidenced by the use of word, "within" and not "for"). It extends for the entire life of the divorced wife until she remarries.

[Ray]

Cato,

Also see

The Shah Bano Mandate - Author - Trideep Raj Bhandari

[Ray]

Cato,

February 21, 2005 Posted By nrglaw
Comments / Questions (1)
Don't Drink and Divorce

By Dan Morrison

Nazma Bibi's husband mistakenly divorced her in a drunken rage. Now his Muslim community in India won't let them get back together.

POLICE GUARDS WATCH OVER NAZMA BIBI'S HOME, a two-room thatch and mud hut, set on a tiny plot of land amid 150 other similar dwellings in Kantabania, a village in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. She gets this treatment not because she is a VIP or a star witness in a celebrity trial, but because she is the nation's most famous reluctant divorc√Še.

Nazma's ordeal started last year during an argument with her husband about money. In the altercation, Nazma's husband, Sher Mohammad, an underemployed laborer, decided he'd had enough of her, and shouted "talaq, talaq, talaq," an Arabic-language renunciation that for a majority of Indian Muslims signals an instant, irreversible divorce.

That he was drunk and enraged-enough to beat his wife, as neighbors looked on-didn't bother the community. For the villagers of Kantabania, Sher's turning to the common demons of alcohol and violence were easy sins to overlook. His inebriated divorce was something else. Neighbors took his renunciation seriously, and they have since used violence and harassment to keep the couple apart.

According to the dominant interpretation of Muslim law in Kantabania, and among the majority of India's Muslims, Nazma and her husband can reunite only if Nazma performs "halala" by marrying another man, consummating the union, and then divorcing again. Since there is no provision in Islamic law for a man to remarry the wife he has renounced, she must first become another man's wife. Only then, locals say, can the couple remarry.

"I don't want to perform halala," Nazma told members of a fact-finding mission from India's National Commission for Women, an advisory body charged with investigating cases in which women are deprived of their constitutional rights. "I want to stay in my house with my husband." For now, though, she's isolated in her home, the symbol of an issue that has opened up explosive questions about gender, religion, and law among India's 135 million Muslims.

INDIA IS A SECULAR STATE, but it's a breed of secularism most Westerners would not recognize. The term "secular" in overwhelmingly Hindu India implies a protection of religion as an institution and of religious minorities and their customs.

Nazma's predicament arises from a clause in India's constitution that allows citizens to conduct their personal and family lives under the laws of a religion recognized by the state, as long as those laws don't violate the constitution or other government laws. You can't drive on the wrong side of the road and declare that your religion commands it. But when Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Sikhs, Christians, and Jews marry, most register at their local temple, mosque, gurudwara, church, or synagogue rather than at city hall. When these marriages end, the disengagement usually happens outside the purview of the state.

In this system, in a major concession to a sometimes restive and often neglected minority, Muslims may govern their personal lives by Sharia, or Islamic law. Shias and members of some other Muslim sects disagree, but according to Indians who follow Sunni Islam, a "triple talaq" is an irrevocable declaration of divorce.

India's courts have issued rulings about Muslim family law, in cases in which litigants claimed that some element of Islamic law contradicted the constitution. But very few Muslims, especially Muslim women, would approach a civil court over a family matter, so the opportunities for courts to interfere have been limited. On the few occasions where the courts have issued judgments, they've often sparked protest.

In a 1985 ruling in Mohammad Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum and Others, India's Supreme Court created an uproar among Muslims by ruling that Shah Bano had a right to financial support after her husband of 43 years divorced and exiled her from their home when he took a second wife. The decision did quote verses from the Koran (Aiyat 241: "For divorced women/Maintenance should be provided/On a reasonable (scale)/This is a duty of the righteous . . . "). But it rested on India's criminal code, which includes a law requiring husbands to pay "maintenance" to their wives, including their ex-wives, until the wives remarry or die.

By citing India's criminal code, which applies to all Indians, the Shah Bano decision superseded Muslim law and sparked widespread protests, including a rally by 300,000 Muslims in Bombay. The Shah Bano decision came at a time of growing religious tensions in India, and the ruling Congress party was faced with an angry core constituency. The next year, Rajiv Gandhi's government passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, which exempts Muslim men from sections of the criminal code requiring them to pay maintenance. The law stipulates that long-term maintenance for a divorced Muslim woman should come from the woman's immediate family, more distant relatives, or Muslim charities. The husband is required to support his former wife only during iddat, the three months immediately after a divorce.

In recent years, however, influential courts have interpreted the Muslim Women Act in ways that have reinforced the Shah Bano decision and have contradicted the intent of the 1986 law. In each case the courts used both civil and Islamic law in their reasoning. In July 2000, for example, the full bench of the Bombay High Court echoed an earlier decision by the Calcutta High Court and ruled that a husband must pay lifetime support to the wife he divorces. The court, which is one of the most prestigious of the 18 high courts that sit just below the country's supreme court, also ruled then that the man should pay all the money within the three-month period of iddat.

Recent decisions have also limited the customary use of triple talaq in India, though only for women who have the confidence to take their disputes to court. In 2002 the Bombay High Court ruled that triple talaq was insufficient for a legal divorce, and it required a husband to file a divorce petition in civil court with due notice to his wife. The court also said that a judge should decide whether the husband had shown cause for divorce and whether he had made proper attempts at reconciliation, as prescribed in the Koran. In that particular case, the husband justified his divorce by saying that his wife had insulted him when she asked for maintenance after he abandoned her and their three children to start another family in another town.

These decisions and others like them didn't arouse the Muslim backlash that the Shah Bano case did, perhaps because Muslim leaders knew better than to expect sympathy from the Hindu nationalist-led coalition that ruled India from 1998 to May 2004. But the decisions may have stirred the background tension that erupted in Kantabania and that has left Nazma Bibi barricaded in her home.

MORE THAN TWO-THIRDS OF INDIA'S ONE BILLION PEOPLE live in rural areas, where personal matters of marriage, birth, death, and inheritance are handled within the community, and where civil authorities are involved only in a crisis. When two men squabble over property, they will likely take it to a community or religious figure rather than to a district official or judge.

This holds even more for Muslims, many of whom fear the state's interference in their private lives. For these villagers, the interpretation of a local small-time cleric can have more meaning than a judge's opinion. While divorce is rare among Indian Muslims, the triple talaq is the most common method.

This reliance on custom over jurisprudence was evident in Nazma's case. About two weeks after the couple's quarrel in July, as word spread that they remained under the same roof, a group of villagers said they couldn't continue to live together. Sher Mohammad was forced to leave the house and return to his home village a few miles away.

In September of last year, the couple went to a nearby town and obtained a legal opinion, or fatwa, from a cleric declaring the talaq invalid due to Sher Mohammad's drunken state. The couple then reunited in Kantabania. Within days, more than 100 people appeared at their home with a fatwa from a different local cleric, declaring the talaq binding. Nazma's husband was beaten. For allowing the couple back into his house, her father was slapped by villagers wielding shoes, a deep insult in South Asia, where shoes symbolize uncleanliness.

After the president of the village's Muslim association reaffirmed the unwanted divorce, Nazma filed a complaint with police in October. Fearful of reprisals, she took refuge with a local nonprofit group where her mother worked as an office helper. In November, members of the state women's commission held hearings in the village and declared the couple's constitutional right to live together. This action, and a later fact-finding mission by the National Commission for Women, only solidified local opposition to Nazma's marriage.

In December, the couple sought help from a district-level court. A judge issued a ruling that nullified the talaq, citing Sher's drunkenness, but locals refused to accept it. Nazma faced a social boycott: She was denied water from the local pump, the eldest of her four children was barred from school, and her father was blocked from working. Not one villager stood up for her in public.

When the couple tried to reunite in Kantabania in the spring of this year, Nazma's husband was again assaulted. A delegation from the National Commission for Women visited from Delhi, 1,000 miles away, and convinced the police to offer protection to Nazma so that she could move back into her father's home. But her husband returned to his parents' home and stayed away.

In June, about 6,000 Muslim men from all over the region held a rally outside a local government office. They presented a petition reaffirming the legality of the divorce, reminded the official of the Muslim male's right to talaq, condemned the interlopers from Delhi, and affirmed the pain they felt over the central government's attempted interference.

For now, local mores have overpowered the constitutional authorities. In a sign of how volatile this subject is, a Muslim editor at a Bombay Hindi-language newspaper who has championed reforms on the talaq issue was stabbed in August. He said the attack had been incited by the editor of an Urdu-language newspaper that had railed against him in its editorial pages. (Urdu is the primary language of most Indian Muslims.) "You insult the holy Koran," one of the two attackers said.

THE SAME TRIPLE TALAQ THAT INDIAN MUSLIMS CONSIDER SACRED is banned in the rest of the Muslim world, including India's closest neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh. "No other country in the world accepts triple talaq except India," said Neelofar Akhtar, a Bombay attorney who specializes in Muslim family law.

The notion that a man is granted immediate divorce by saying "talaq" three times doesn't appear in the Koran. Divorce as described in the Koran requires three months of attempted reconciliation and arbitration before the couple can split. To divorce, the husband says talaq three times, but each of these talaqs must be separated by a month, and the first two are always revocable. Thus, in most Muslim countries, even the utterance of "talaq, talaq, talaq" is legally counted as a single renunciation that must be confirmed a month later and again a month after that.

Triple talaq first entered Islamic law when Umar, the second Caliph of Sunni Islam, a successor to the Prophet, learned that some husbands were using the threat of divorce as leverage against their wives. The caliph responded in 637 A.D. by making the triple talaq a valid, instant divorce. Doing so was his way of declaring, "Don't say it if you don't mean it."

Shia Muslims and some Sunni sects hold this to be the caliph's personal opinion, an innovation on the Koran made by Umar without proper consensus, and thus invalid. Ali, who was the fourth caliph of Sunni Islam and the first Shia imam, disagreed with Umar's decision at the time, as did other leading Sahaba, or companions of the Prophet.

In India, however, a majority of scholars believe the triple talaq is legitimate. Without the state deciding Islamic jurisprudence, as happens elsewhere in the Muslim world, and without a single civil code for all Indians, matters of Sharia are left to the Ulema, the community of Muslim scholars, most of whom favor the triple talaq.

The central government "does not have the authority to ban it," said Uzma Nahid, a headscarf-wearing Bombay feminist and a member of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board. "It is part of Sharia."

But progressives like Nahid are seeking to make an end run around the triple talaq within Sharia law by promulgating a model marriage contract, or nikahnama, in which the groom agrees to transfer to the bride his authority to pronounce talaq, so that she has the final say in voicing their decision to divorce. The signing of a nikahnama before marriage is a Koranic practice, but the content of the document is left up to the bride and groom.

Nahid says that conservative scholars of the Ulema have slowly come to acknowledge the misuse of triple talaq as a social problem, and to accept in principle the model nikahnama as a way to diminish its use. But local custom trumps all of these scholars, and Nahid holds out little hope for changing the custom, or for Nazma to escape the isolation she's now locked into. Said Nahid, "There is a man's psychology that will not give liberation to women."

Arizona Family Law Blog: Don't Drink and Divorce

See this also:

Gudiya: Prisoner of woe

[Ray]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ray View Post
I am South Asian and an Indian.

Partition has made no difference to India, where the population continues to have the same religious mix as before and secular laws are in place. Sharia, however, operates through the backdoor for the faithful!

Pakistan is 98% Moslem and Islamic Laws rule all, irrespective of religion.

In so far as Partition bringing peace, the facts are on the ground and history is too recent to recount.

Iraq, too, will burn!

Wrong as usual.

And pray what is wrong?

The above is not wrong.

And on Iraq, Cato's analysis seems sound!

[Ray]

Iran is now open about its plans to involve itself in Iraq

Iranian Reveals Plan to Expand Role in Iraq


Published: January 29, 2007

BAGHDAD, Jan. 28 — Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad outlined an ambitious plan on Sunday to greatly expand its economic and military ties with Iraq — including an Iranian national bank branch in the heart of the capital — just as the Bush administration has been warning the Iranians to stop meddling in Iraqi affairs.

Iran’s plan, as outlined by the ambassador, carries the potential to bring Iran into further conflict here with the United States, which has detained a number of Iranian operatives in recent weeks and says it has proof of Iranian complicity in attacks on American and Iraqi forces.

More at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/wo...html?th&emc=th

[Archer]

And pray what is wrong?

The above is not wrong.

And on Iraq, Cato's analysis seems sound!

Ray, try to understand- Sparten will promptly declare that Pakistans is not 98% Muslim but 96% or the like, and that its minorities are not subject to Islamic law, and hence you are incorrect. ;)

Of course, what will pass unsaid is the fact that at the turn of independence, Pakistans minorities were almost a quarter of its population and are today at the low single digits. Also, what will be left unsaid is that despite the so called separate laws (if their indeed are some), the multitude of Paks minorities live in fear of crossing islamic laws targetted and use against them, such as that of offending the prophet or the Quran, which is routinely used to target nonmuslims.

So these semantic debating tactics, might obfuscate the "core issue" and Sparten might proudly declare you "wrong", irrespective of the actual facts on the ground.