Marriage has been considered the ideal means by all cultures for establishing a family. It helps both husbands and wives lead a happy and comfortable life with mental peace and stability. But for many Saudi couples, such thinking about marriage is only a dream.
There are many facts that turn a marriage between a Saudi man and woman from dream to painful nightmare, subsequently making life a hell. This is the case of every woman abandoned by her husband without providing her with proper care or attention. Such women are in a not-married and not-divorced situation — neither one nor the other.
The consent of the husband is essential for a woman to get a divorce. But some will not allow their estranged wives to leave them. They punish them by keeping them “muallaqat” or “suspended” — neither married nor divorced. This is a big problem in our society. There are stories of women living in this painful situation and suffering from physical and mental torture. Some of them take the path of immorality, either to take revenge against their husbands or to satisfy their bodily desires or as a means of forgetting everything and punishing themselves.
Alarabiya.net published an investigative report on July 5, 2005, on this phenomenon, giving harrowing stories of such women of different ages who have wasted their lives in court seeking a divorce which is not granted to them.
According to the report, one woman said her husband would not sleep with her but with her friend. Another said her husband abandoned her after he had a dispute with her father for a reason that had nothing to do with her. Another woman said she engaged in immoral practices to take revenge on her husband.
Before the Alarabiya.net report, Sayidaty magazine, a sister publication of Arab News, published interviews with several women whose husbands had left them several years ago but who had not obtained a divorce and so were caught in a situation of not being married or divorced. There are many different reasons for women having such terrible lives. But there was one point in common. Husbands wanted to exploit the weakness of their wives, their inability to respond and their ignorance and weak position in society.
Some of these women who had children from their husbands spoke of mental and social pressure from their families who consider them a burden and blame them for their present predicament. The children of these women are brought up without the care or support of fathers. Both women and children need the support of husbands or fathers to meet their material requirements. Children, especially those who have reached the age of puberty, need special care for education. The role of the husband, who was supposed to fulfill these duties, remains vacant in the case of these women who do not know where to go and what to do, especially when their families consider them a burden.
We talk about centers that support widows, divorced, women, poor families and orphans. But generally their role is limited to extending material assistance. This alone will not be enough for these women and their children. They need social, mental and psychological care. We are also in need of clear-cut laws to protect the rights of these women. For several years, we have been reading reports of men abandoning their wives without facing any charge.
The strange thing is that all these women who have presented their stories have not received any benefit by taking their cases to courts; what they have done is add insult to injury. At every hearing, the husband is absent and the case remains open. Judges will not make serious efforts to help the women win their rights.
Islam does not approve of such treatment. Allah has said in the Holy Qur’an: “Either keep them (wives) in the appropriate manner or release them in the appropriate manner.” We want to see the judiciary live up to the command of this Qur’anic verse.
We cannot expect all husbands to follow moral values and the teachings of Islam and handle their relations with their wives justly. We have to set up rules and regulations to determine the relationship between husband and wife and these laws must be implemented without fail.
Some of the solutions proposed to alleviate the suffering of these women should be judicial and also social. With regard to judicial solutions, we should set up special benches in courts to deal with cases in which women abandoned by their husbands can approach. The court could give adequate time for the husband to return — within a period of six months, for example — and if he fails to appear within that period, the court will have the right to grant the woman a divorce. These benches would be in the form of a committee of Islamic scholars to rule on matters such as divorce. What I am trying to emphasize here is that our courts should have these benches to deal with divorce cases and should work in accordance with a declared and well-known law and legal precedent.
The social solution to the problem is that the family of the wife, including her father, brothers and relatives, put pressure on her husband either to live with her normally or divorce her. This can be done either directly or by contacting the man’s family. There will be people who understand the situation and who can mediate to settle the issue peacefully.
We are a conservative society and we are ruled by many customs and traditions including those related to marriage and divorce. The family, which helped their daughter to get married, should not abandon her after marriage. They should play their part in getting her a divorce if she wants that instead of abandoning her to a life with an abusive husband. The exploitation of their weakness and judicial indifference will make such women angry at society and sometimes push them to do things that are unbecoming, which they would never do in normal circumstances. As a result of mental, social and economic pressures, they forget their nature and honor and often commit mistakes that will destroy their lives once and for all.
Such women, wherever they are, are likely to commit crimes as it is a natural result of factors surrounding them. So it is the duty of the entire society to find suitable solutions for protecting women from injustice, exploitation and the highhandedness of men in order to preserve their honor and humanity.
(Maha Al-Hujailan is a medical researcher at King Khaled University Hospital in Riyadh. She can be reached at [email protected].)