Rising Divorce Rates in the Muslim World

Assalamu alaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa barakatu. Let's talk about divorce in the Muslim world because apparently, it is something that should alarm us. Despite the fact that the divorce rate in the Muslim community in the West is still considerably lower than the rate of non Muslim divorce in the West and despite the fact that the overall divorce rate in the Muslim world is drastically lower than any community's divorce rate in the West, it is true that overall Muslims are getting divorced more than they used to. Or are they? Well, that depends on the time frame that you're looking at.

Just like with the stock market, if you have a stock, you can look at the share price activity over a variety of different time frames. You can look at a minute by minute chart, you can look at a five minute chart, an hourly chart, a daily chart, weekly, monthly, or even a yearly So if we're looking at the divorce rates among Muslims in a shorter time frame, then yes, it does appear that the divorce rates overall have been going up, and so we find that rise alarming. We conclude that Muslims have been affected by the West and Western trends in marriage and divorce are therefore beginning to affect our community. But if you want a more accurate picture, then I think that you should look at a longer time frame. Because the truth is that divorce among Muslims used to be much more frequent than it is now.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, in many Muslim countries, roughly half of all marriages ended in divorce. And it was standard that most people, men and women, would marry multiple times over the course of their lives. During the Ottoman Empire, divorce appears to have been a relatively common occurrence throughout the Muslim world. In this region, Malaysia and the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, there are records of divorce rates reaching as high as seventy percent. As recently as the nineteen thirties, some forty nine out of one hundred marriages in Egypt ended in divorce.

If you go back further, say to the time of Ibn Taymiyyah, roughly three out of every ten marriages would end in divorce, and most women married at least twice in their lifetime with many women marrying multiple times. There is no obvious stigma attached to divorce or to divorcees in the available historical records. Rather, divorce appears to have been a more or less normative phenomenon throughout Muslim society. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of colonialism and western influence in the Muslim world changed our attitudes and our approaches to marriage, to family, and to divorce, which is why we actually see divorce rates in the Muslim world declining in the latter part of the twentieth century. It seems that we began to adopt Western concepts of the nuclear family and the till death do you part notions of marriage.

Because think about it, divorce can actually expand familial networks if you are not operating within a western non Muslim paradigm. Say a man and a woman get married, they have children, now those children are connected to the families on the father's side and on the mother's side. If those parents divorce and then remarry, then those same children will now be connected to even more families, with more grandparents, more uncles, more aunts, more cousins, and even half brothers and half sisters. Through the subsequent marriages of their parents, their familial support networks will actually grow. Because back in those days, in the Islamic world, divorce did not have to mean abandonment of children or the severance of family ties.

It just meant the dissolution of a contractual relationship between the husband and wife. And there was no reason for this to dissolve all of the familial relations that resulted from that contractual relationship. Divorce did not have to be acrimonious, and the husbands and wives did not have to become enemies, and their respective families didn't become rival factions. That's the way we as Muslims used to approach this issue. With the spread of Western influence, however, we started to change how we thought about marriage, about family, and about divorce.

Our families started to look and operate more like Western families. Our attitudes began to resemble their attitudes and our divorce rates dropped. Even now, our current alarm about rising divorce rates reflects that we are still under the influence of Western concepts and Western thinking. Because if you look at the broader scope of history, if today Muslim divorce rates are going up, that actually just means that they are returning to standard levels that we always have had. It's what the stock market would refer to as a correction in the market.

In other words, at the latter part of the twentieth century, Muslim divorce rates dropped uncharacteristically and are now beginning to return to previous norms. Now I am not actually saying that divorce is something good or we should embrace a rising rate of divorce. But what should alarm us or concern us about the rising rates of divorce isn't the rising rate of divorce itself, but how we approach the issues of marriage and divorce and a family. Because if we are following Western thinking and it's because we're following Western thinking that the divorce rates are rising, then, yes, that approach to divorce is concerning. Because the way that we used to actually approach the issue of divorce was much healthier and less detrimental to society than the way the West approaches the issues of divorce.

So if we are dealing with them according to Western thinking, that is a problem. Historically, in the Muslim divorce did not shatter families. In the West, it does. So if we are taking their approach, then that's harmful. But divorce can be handled honorably, which is what Islam mandates.

And when it is done this way, it does not constitute a serious problem for society nor even for individual families. So really it is our thinking that needs to be addressed. Divorce was common in the Muslim world and this did not negatively impact our societies precisely because we did not approach this issue from western paradigms and mentalities that turned divorces into catastrophes. Now this brings up again the issue of marrying divorcees. So let me reiterate once again, most Muslim women throughout history married multiple times over the course of their lives.

It was not unusual for divorcees to marry, rather that was absolutely commonplace. What was unusual, and what our communities always strove to avoid, was for people to be single for extended periods of time, men or women. It is encouraged for people to be married, and it is fundamentally un Islamic to discourage marriage. Being divorced in the Muslim world never meant that you were disqualified from getting married again, and this should not be the case now. Anyone today who attaches an overly dramatic stigma to divorce or to divorcees is someone who is deeply submerged in Western non Muslim thinking.

And the solution, as with anything, is, of course, to just return to the correct Islamic values, attitudes, and paradigms, and to purge oneself of mentalities, and paradigms, and attitudes, and approaches that are actually foreign to our deen. Jazakum Allahu Khayran wa Salaam Alaikum.