Self-Determination and Women’s Rights in Muslim Societies

4. Reconsidering "Talaq": Marriage, Divorce, and Sharia Reform in the Republic of Maldives

4 95 Reconsidering Talaq M a r r i a g e , D i v o r c e , a n D S h a r i a r e f o r M i n t h e r e p u b l i c o f M a l D i v e S The Maldives, an entirely Muslim society that is reputed to have the highest divorce rate in the world, enacted comprehensive family law reform in 2001 designed to create greater equality between men and women. One of the key aspects of this reform was new restrictions on the verbal male divorce prerogative known as talaq. This chapter takes up this key issue in the Maldives as a case study to reveal some of the contradictions between de jure reform and de facto outcomes. Although the reforms created near-equality of the sexes before the law, the chapter argues that the two constituent components—Western secular law and Islamic religious law—created a dialectic between two forms of patriarchy that endangers the customary rights and freedoms that Maldivians understand to be their peculiarly national version of “folk Islam.” With regard to marriage and divorce, this folk Islam contains surprising spaces for women’s quotidian social and sexual agency that may be endangered by largely top-down attempts to reform family law, make it more gender equal, and bring a n t h o n y M a r c u S l aw a n D c u lt u r e 96 the Maldives in line with international norms governing the nexus between family, property, and the state. On 1 July 2001 the Republic of Maldives—an atoll-based Muslim nation of roughly 350,000 people, located about 600 kilometers south of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean—followed Algeria, Turkey, Tunisia, and other Islamic nations in enacting a comprehensive family law reform. As with other such programs in the Muslim world, the Maldives reform was presented as an attempt to reconcile the aspirations of women, particularly educated ones, with the conflicting demands of national development and neotraditional nationalist ideologies that hold Islamic Sharia to be both custom and culture in the countries of the world’s Islamic community, or ummah. The Maldivian reforms granted women nearly complete de jure equality with men, in a country already known for the greatest equality between the sexes in South Asia. As was the case with the sweeping family law reform of 2004 in Morocco, members of the international community and Maldivian civil society advocates for women’s rights who were connected to institutions involved in the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (cedaw) hailed the Maldivian family law reform as an important step forward. However, as has been the case for family law reform in both the West and the East, de facto outcomes often relate in confusing and contradictory ways to de jure statutes, and many Maldivian women are unable or unwilling to access their new rights, often leaving them in similar circumstances—or worse ones—due to patriarchal backlash (Moghadam 2008). In the Maldives, nearly a decade after family law reform, there has been very little research about onthe -ground outcomes of this crucial moment in Maldivian gender relations and legal history.1 This chapter, based on nine months of ethnographic research in the Maldives in 2006–7, will attempt to begin a discussion of the relationship between Maldivian family law reform and social practice by looking at the way in which some of the changes that were ostensibly designed to provide greater equality for women may have actually reduced their ability to exert agency over their role in family life. Divorce, which is more common in the Maldives than anywhere else in the Muslim world,2 (Warren 2006; United Nations, Population Division 2009) is viewed as a key social problem by both neotraditionalists and secular progressives (Hama Jamiyya 2007). It has been described by liberal observers both within and external to the Maldives as being responsible for everything from r e c o n S i D e r i n g TA L AQ 97 high rates of child abuse and juvenile delinquency to disease, sickness, and poverty (Asian Development Bank 2007; United Nations, Committee on the Rights of the Child 1998; World Health Organization 2006). Islamicists are equally disturbed by the Maldivian disregard...