Women apply for most Islamic divorces in Australia, but imams often refuse to grant them. Muslim leaders have condemned domestic violence, though some still teach that husbands can control their wives.
The first time Noor* visited the Board of Imams Victoria, in Melbourne’s Coburg North, to apply for an Islamic divorce, she took with her an audio recording she had secretly made during one of her husband’s violent outbursts.
“It was of one night when he was screaming and yelling at me in front of the children,” said Noor, a Muslim who wore a niqab during her decades-long marriage.
“He was verbally abusing me, smashing doors, ripping up sheets, putting down me and my family … I taped it thinking no one would believe me.”
Once inside the building, a glass-fronted office space wedged between an electrical store and a denture clinic on a sleepy stretch of Sydney Road, Noor sat down nervously before a panel of five male imams and carefully recounted the years of physical, emotional and financial abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband, who had recently breached the intervention order she had taken out against him.
He often criticised and yelled at her in front of the kids, she told ABC News, for petty reasons — for example, if she didn’t prepare food to his liking.
And he beat her, she said, when she confronted him about his escalating financial abuse.
For a long time, she believed his violence was her fault. “I would think it was reasonable”, she said, “because I thought I’d done something wrong, and I deserved it.”
He also repeatedly threatened to take another wife, which hurt and distressed Noor, not only because they were already struggling financially.
“I’m allowed to marry four women,” he told her. “You have to change your Western mentality.”
Now he was refusing to grant her a religious divorce.
Muslims in Australia may have a civil divorce, but if they do not also obtain a religious divorce, they are considered still married in Islamic law — and in the eyes of their community.
Getting an Islamic divorce, however, can be a difficult and protracted process, especially for women, who face stricter requirements for initiating divorce than men, depending on the laws of their cultural community.
While a husband is allowed to divorce his wife at any time, without cause, often imams will not grant a woman divorce without her husband’s consent, or proof she has legitimate grounds for an annulment (which, depending on the legal school, can include infidelity, physical, financial or emotional harm, and sexual dysfunction).
In theory, domestic violence is one such reason: if a woman can prove her husband has been abusive — for example, by producing an intervention order, or photographs of her physical injuries — imams in Australia say they’ll dissolve the marriage and hand over the paperwork, no problem.
But in practice, advocates and survivors say many imams are denying women the right to divorce, in too many cases detaining them in abusive marriages for years.
Confronting domestic violence in Islam
Most Muslims believe Islam abhors violence. So why do some say the Koran sanctions “lightly” beating your wife?
This was Noor’s experience. Having presented the Board of Imams with what she believed was sufficient evidence, she was hopeful they’d acknowledge her husband’s violence and swiftly grant a divorce.
Instead they dismissed the tape, she said, and told her to give the relationship another chance. “I honestly thought they weren’t listening to me,” she said. “They wanted me to go back and try again for the sake of the kids.”
When she insisted she had tried, that she had made up her mind, they told her they needed to hear her husband’s “side of the story” and that they’d be in touch after that.
It took six months for the Board of Imams to get back to her, Noor said, at which point they claimed to have forgotten the details of her case and asked her to come back in to retell her story.
Eventually, after a year of waiting, calling, praying, Noor — who had moved in with her parents — withdrew her divorce application, defeated and depleted.
“It killed me,” she said. At that stage she wasn’t interested in starting a new relationship; she simply longed to be free of a man who for years had controlled every aspect of her life.
“For me to move on psychologically I had to get that Islamic divorce … I just wanted closure for me and my children, and at the same time I wanted [my ex] to stop saying I was his wife.”
‘It’s easier to divorce in some Muslim countries’
In many Muslim countries around the world, women-led campaigns to reform Islamic laws governing marriage and divorce are gaining momentum.
In India, for example, the government is set to introduce new laws banning Muslim men from instantly divorcing their wives simply by pronouncing “talaq” — the Arabic word for divorce — three times.
Some countries — including Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Morocco — also stipulate women’s right to initiate divorce in standard marriage contracts.
But in Australia, where Islamic law (sharia) operates in the shadow of the official legal system and the all-male imams who administer it with impunity, Muslim women’s right to leave a marriage is not always recognised.
Compounding the problem, social workers and survivors say, is the fact that many imams are ignorant or dismissive of the dynamics and seriousness of domestic violence.
(There is no evidence suggesting Muslim women experience domestic abuse at a higher rate; no reliable data on this question has ever been collected in Australia.)
An illustration shows a woman in a purple head scarf sitting before a panel of unidentifiable men.
An interviewed several Muslim women in Australia who have experienced great difficulty getting a divorce.
Many were threatened, raped or beaten by their husbands after instigating the process; one, a Lebanese Muslim woman living in Melbourne, said she had left her husband nine years ago but had been denied a divorce several times by the Board of Imams Victoria, who said they couldn’t track the man down to seek his approval.
Now, advocates are sounding the alarm and demanding agency and equality for women in the Islamic divorce process, which they say is not only stacked against women and re-traumatising for survivors of abuse, but putting women’s lives at risk.
Do you have a story to share? If you are a Muslim survivor of domestic abuse, or have experience with the Islamic divorce process in Australia, please get in touch (we respect your confidentiality):
Salma*, who has worked with Australian Muslim women escaping violence for more than two decades, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from imams, says she has never seen a woman get an Islamic divorce easily “unless her husband wants to divorce her, too”.
“It is easier to get a divorce in some Muslim countries” — where women’s rights are outlined in statutory laws — “than it is in Australia,” Salma said.
“That’s not without its complications, and women can still have a difficult time, but they’re not held captive by how a particular imam at a particular mosque interprets sharia.”
Trapping women in unwanted marriages is a form of abuse, Salma says, and a violation of human rights: “For women to not have the absolute right to leave a marriage is the very definition of structural violence and it needs to change.”
Imams say they have taken steps in recent years to improve the process for women — for example, by participating in family violence training programs and employing women to assist with divorce applications involving domestic abuse.
“We don’t force any woman to go back to her husband or ‘be patient’ — that’s not the way,” said Sheikh Muhammad Nawas Saleem, the secretary of the Board of Imams Victoria, one of several informal councils of imams in Australia that adjudicates Islamic divorce (these councils represent the Sunni denomination of Islam, of which the vast majority of Muslims in Australia are part).
But an ABC investigation — part of an ongoing series examining the complex links between religion and domestic violence — has found that just in the past few weeks, several women with family violence intervention orders have been told to return to unsafe marriages by the Board of Imams Victoria.
(In Victoria, a family violence intervention order is made by a magistrate to protect a person from family violence, including physical, emotional, financial and sexual abuse.)
‘But he doesn’t hit you’
One woman who had suffered severe physical and emotional abuse by her husband for more than a decade applied to the Board of Imams Victoria for a divorce earlier this year.
But according to a family violence worker assisting the woman, during one of her meetings the imams said they would not finalise the divorce unless she first came in to discuss the terms with her husband.
The fact that she had an intervention order against him didn’t matter, they said; she could sit in one corner of the room and her husband in another.
“I was shocked,” said the family violence worker, who asked not to be named. “There’s no respect for the law.”
In a subsequent meeting, the worker said, the imams told the woman to go back to her husband and “try again” for a month.
“They tried to convince her to go back. They said, ‘for the sake of the kids, go back’,” she said. “But it was for the sake of her children that she left him in the first place.”
Part of the problem is the stubborn belief among many imams that domestic abuse is only ever physical.
Late last year, Maryam*, a mother of three living in Melbourne, met twice with the Board of Imams Victoria.
The two imams handling her divorce application disregarded her husband’s abuse and insisted she go back to him, she said, despite the fact she had left him several times in recent years and had previously taken out an intervention order against him.
An illustration shows a woman wearing a hijab kneeling on a carpet, praying.
Her husband, who is still refusing to agree to the divorce, had been controlling from the beginning of their marriage, she told ABC News: she wasn’t allowed to spend a cent without his permission, he tried to stop her from working and he was critical of her housework, yelling at her and complaining to her family if she didn’t cook and clean to his liking.
He even tracked the kilometres she drove in the car, she said, and accused her of lying about where she’d been if the odometer showed a higher reading than he believed was appropriate.
“I told them [the imams] it’s an emotionally, psychologically and financially abusive relationship. But they were like, ‘But he doesn’t hit you’ … Because he wasn’t hitting me they didn’t consider it domestic violence,” Maryam said.
“I’m really upset, and I’m disappointed in them because they’re supposed to be leaders and role models, and instead they’re pushing me back to an abusive relationship and just telling me to live with it.”
Survivors say this attitude — that women are unqualified to make decisions about their own safety and wellbeing — is evident among Australia’s most senior Islamic clerics.
(A Sunni Islamic scholar, the Grand Mufti is elected by the Australian National Imams Council. A new Mufti was elected last month.)
Jewish wives held hostage in abusive marriages
An upsurge in cases of men refusing to grant their wives a religious divorce is causing mounting alarm in Australian Jewish communities.
Sitting in his Fairfield office, she claims she told him she had fled the marital home and was adamant there was no going back: “At times he was compassionate,” Yasmin said.
“But he said that, because I am a woman, I was very emotional and that I wasn’t thinking with a clear mind. He told me to go away and think about it before I made a decision.”
At no point during her meetings with him, she claims, did the Mufti refer her to any domestic violence services or suggest she go to police: “I felt really let down … that I didn’t really have a voice,” she said.
“I was terrified of something bad happening — people were telling me that leaving is the most dangerous time, and I didn’t know what he [my ex] was capable of. And yet I was being made to feel as if I was making the wrong decision, that I didn’t know how to keep a marriage going … that I was too free-minded.”
After several weeks — and, according to Yasmin, two heated arguments with the Mufti about her Islamic rights and entitlements — she says she was reluctantly granted a divorce, though her dealings with him and other Western Sydney imams have left her scarred.
“If I ever had an ounce of love for my religion, it’s been taken away from me because of the way these men have completely hijacked it to benefit them.”
In a response from his lawyers, Dr Ibrahim said he was “very surprised by these allegations”.
He stressed that he does not divorce couples, nor officiate Islamic marriages, and “does not ordinarily meet with members of the public to discuss these issues”.
He added that it is the Australian National Imams Council’s “procedure to refer the victims of any suspected emotional or psychological forms of domestic abuse to a psychologist … and any physical domestic abuse to the police” and that he has “certainly employed this practice in his personal capacity”.
Women do not have equal rights to divorce
So if refusing to let women leave violent marriages is, as imams insist, “not the way”, if they are taking domestic violence as seriously as they claim, why are women still struggling to access religious divorce? What can be done? And why are so few women prepared to speak out about their experience?
Interviewed dozens of survivors, social workers, women’s advocates, academics and imams over the past four months with three main findings.
First, the Islamic divorce process is often inconsistent and ad-hoc, confusing for women to navigate, lacking in procedural fairness and administered by imams who operate with no oversight or accountability.
Second, imams’ response to women seeking divorce from abusive husbands shows a persistent lack of awareness — or worse, a blatant ignorance or denial — of the dynamics of domestic violence and the legal conditions of intervention orders.
Family violence and murder in Australian Hindu and Sikh communities
There are growing concerns about a recent, significant increase in domestic violence in Hindu and Sikh communities, a crisis which has become public in a spate of horrific deaths.
As a result, women are being told by imams who claim to be acting in the name of Islamic law to be patient with violent marriages.
But the crux of the issue, experts say, is the fact that the laws governing Islamic divorce in Australia are based on deeply conservative, patriarchal interpretations of Islam, which means women’s rights are ultimately ignored.
As Salma said: “Unless women are given the right to divorce that is equivalent to men’s, every other sort of reform is window-dressing.”
In addition, many Muslims believe Islamophobia in Australia continually distorts any discussion of their religion with an intensity and focus on fringe groups or sentiments that do not represent the whole community.
This, they say, deters them from speaking out about issues like gender inequality and domestic violence and is stifling progress in Muslim communities, by giving cover to imams, and perpetuating the silence among women, leaving them more vulnerable to abuse.
Simply raising the issue is often construed as an attack on Islam, rather than an opportunity to examine cultural factors — or patriarchal structures — within Muslim communities that may be exacerbating or concealing abuse.
Imams were put on notice a decade ago
The little evidence that has been produced on family violence in Muslim communities has long been buried.
A decade ago, imams accused of condoning domestic violence were put on notice when a landmark report by the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council of Victoria revealed some imams were condoning rape in marriage, hindering police from pursuing domestic violence charges and denying abused women seeking Islamic divorce their rights and entitlements.
The 2008 research, which was commissioned and funded by the Howard Government, involved “extensive community consultation” with Muslim women, community and legal workers and police.
Imams, who it said were ill-equipped to respond to complex modern problems including marriage, divorce and domestic abuse, were also reported to have conducted polygamous and underage marriages.
In response, Sheikh Fehmi Naji El-Imam, then Mufti of Australia, said it was “absolutely wrong” that women’s rights were ignored in marriage or divorce, or that imams brushed aside domestic violence.
He also “absolutely” denied the issues raised in the report. “They must have heard stories here and there and are writing about them as though they are fact,” he said of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council.
The report then vanished and has never been publicly released; the Home Affairs department said it was unable to supply News with a copy because “it is not a publicly available report”. It declined to provide further comment.
What are imams saying about abuse?
However, the problems identified in the 2008 report are still significant, and remain unaddressed, Muslim women say.
A close examination of public statements by some influential Muslim clerics reveals conflicting messages about whether Islam allows for — or even at times condones — the non-physical abuse and control of women.
Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman, the president of the Australian National Imams Council, was the lead signatory on a letter signed last year by more than 30 Muslim figures that condemned “all forms of intimidation and abuse targeting women.
(ABC NEWS)
